Federico
Garcia Lorca, Spain's greatest modern poet and playwright, was born June
5, 1898 at Fuentevaqueros in the Spanish province of Granada. He began
writing poems in his late teens, reciting many of them in the local cafes.
In 1919 he left to study law at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid.
There he met and became friends with film director Luis Bunuel and painter
Salvador Dali, among other Spanish notables of his generation. Lorca came
to national prominence in 1927 when his play Mariana Pineda was first
staged. His initial book of poems Gypsy Ballads was published the following
year. During a trip abroad, which also took him to England and Cuba, Lorca
spent nine months in New York City beginning in June of 1929. His poems
of that period were later collected in the volume entitled Poet In New
York. In 1931 Spain became a Republic which gave hope to many, Lorca included,
that Spain's standard of living would be improved, its lliteracy reduced
and its culture more widely disseminated. Lorca became director of a student
theater company which toured small villages and in the face of harassment
by Fascist partisans presented the Spanish classics to the peasants. His
first great play, the rural tragedy Blood Wedding, was staged in 1933.
It was immensely popular in Spain and in Argentina which he visited late
that year. In 1935 he presented his second village tragedy, Yerma, and
completed his third, La Casa de Bernardo Alba. Lorca spent much of early
1936 preparing Divan Del Tamarit, a cycle of poems written in tribute
to Granada's old Arab poets whom he had read in translation. In July,
shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went to vacation
in Granada which had fallen to the fascists on the first day of the conflict.
Although he had no political affiliations Lorca was known to be a friend
of left-wing intellectuals and an advocate of liberty. Apparently this
was enough of an indictment for those Falangists who arrested him on August
16th. On or about August 18, 1936 Federico Garcia Lorca, along with a
white-haired schoolmaster and two anarchist bullfighters, was driven to
the village of Viznar at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There
at dawn they were executed by a right-wing firing squad. Although his
remains are presumed to lie with those of hundreds of fellow victims in
a shallow trench among the grove of olive trees adjacent to the Fuente
Grande spring, the actual whereabouts of Lorca's grave are unknown to
this day. Rick Klaus Theis, 8/18/97 (cited from http://members.aol.com/mwpress/lorcabio.html) |