Martha Sprackland reviews Sonnets of Dark Love / The Tamarit Divan, by Federico García Lorca, translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca, Enitharmon, 2017.
Sonnets of Dark Love / The Tamarit Divan, by Federico García Lorca, translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca, Enitharmon, 2017.
‘…Spain is, at all times, stirred by the duende, country of ancient music and dance, where the duende squeezes out those lemons of dawn, a country of death, a country open to death […] in Spain grow tiny weeds of death, allusions and voices, perceptible to an alert spirit, that fill the memory with the stale air of our own passing. It’s no accident that all Spanish art is rooted in our soil, full of thistles and sharp stones…’
– Lorca, Juego y teoría del duende (Play and Theory of the Duende), 1933
This slender bilingual edition, containing translations by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca, alongside a pair of lively and knowledgeable essays by Lorca scholars Christopher Maurer and Andrés Soria Olmedo, is an appealing new contribution to our understanding of Lorca in English. Each of the two collections the editors have brought together here was published posthumously; the first, Diván del Tamarit, was written at the same time Lorca gave his famous speech on the theory of duende from which the quote above is taken. The second, Sonetos del amor oscuro, is a collection of mysterious love poems.
The editors’ decision to present these two volumes together was a good one. The familiar symbols and motifs of Lorca’s cosmology are to be found across the Sonnets and the Divan (the inscrutable work of ants, the irrational presence of scented jasmine, roots, roses, a play of light and shadow), and each contains impassioned addresses to a longed-for tú (only in the Sonnets does this blurred figure resolve, slightly, with the use of a masculine verb form). There are many points of contact across the boundaries of the two books:
I have closed my balcony
because I do not want to hear the weeping
(Qasida II, ‘Of the weeping’)
is recalled in the very last of the Sonnets, the poem that closes this volume:
And the sun entered the closed balcony
and the coral of life opened its branch
over my shrouded heart.
(‘Night of sleepless love’)
and there’s an odd chiming effect, the bell in the Alhambra’s Torre de la Vela striking the night again and again, in the recurrence of certain words across the casidas, gacelas and sonetos. From the gacelas:
In silence grass covers
the grey valley of your body.
Under the arch of an encounter
hemlock is growing.
(Ghazal VII, ‘Of the memory of love’)
against this, from the sonetos:
This light, this fire that devours,
this grey landscape that surrounds me […]
your heart gives me a valley spread
with hemlock and the passion of bitter knowledge.
(‘Wounds of love’)
Although univocal, unlike the Gypsy Ballads, the tone of the Sonnets is a departure from his earlier themes of isolation and death – these are by no means absent; these are poems of pain – but are softened and transmuted by the present-absence of the beloved, whose mouth and cheek, eyes, breath, waist are evoked and made real even in the agony of the poet’s longing.
More fascinating to me are the poems of the Divan, whose passionate engagement with the verse forms of Arabic poetry, if not its subject-matter, are evidence of their author’s admiration for that world, and the deep sisterhood of Spanish and Arabic poetries in Arab Andalusia: ‘In all Arab music,’ he asserted in 1933, ‘dance, song or elegy, the arrival of duende is greeted with vigorous cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ so close to the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and who knows whether they are not the same?’ These poems remake the qasida and the ghazal under the star of the duende, that which ‘loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression’.
I like Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca’s versions very much, just as I enjoyed their translation of the Gypsy Ballads, also published by Enitharmon five years ahead of this volume. The poems in English are fluid, readable, and faithful without being slavish; where the image has demanded compromise from the line, that compromise has been handled with skill. The temptation to be flamboyant or grandstanding is evaded (I was glad to see ‘la luna con boca de serpiente’ rendered firmly as ‘the moon with its snake mouth’ rather than ‘the snake-mouthed moon’, which is a flourish I could imagine others making.)
Admittedly, we lose some of the duende, some of the honeyed darkness, some of the diabolical appetite, of the original, but, as Lorca himself said, ‘Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline … [it] has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood’ – it’s hard to see how any translation could carry this over, particularly from a poet so rooted in the earth of his native Spain. Nevertheless, with this volume we are in safe hands. I’m glad to have had the chance to read poems like this short one, the final qasida in the Divan. In the Spanish it has a lilting, folklorish hush, like the wind blowing at night. I like the English, too; though it is not the same, it conveys something of that vagrant thought, the long last lines of each stanza trailing into the distance:
La rosa
no buscaba la aurora:
casi eterna en su ramo,
buscaba otra cosa.
La rosa
no buscaba ni ciencia ni sombra:
confín de carne y sueño,
buscaba otra cosa.
La rosa
no buscaba la rosa:
inmovíl poe el cielo,
buscaba otra cosa.
The rose
was not searching for dawn:
almost eternal on its stem,
it was looking for something else.
The rose
did not search for science or shadow:
confine of flesh and dream,
it was looking for something else.
The rose
did not search for the rose:
immobile in the sky,
it was looking for something else.
(Casida VII, ‘De la rosa’; Qasida VII, ‘Of the rose’)
– Martha Sprackland
Martha Sprackland is editor at Offord Road Books, Poetry London and La Errante. A debut collection in 2020 follows pamphlets Glass As Broken Glass (Rack, 2017) and Milk Tooth (Rough Trade, 2018).