Lorca

RASHEED EL-ENANY
Poets and rebels: reflections of Lorca in modern

Arabic poetry
Garcia Lorca *
by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
In his heart is a stove
Whose fire feeds the hungry.
From its hell gushes forth water:
A flood purging the earth of evil.
Of flame his eyes weave a sail,
Whose threads they gather from the spindles of rain,
From eyes which emit fire,
From the breasts of mothers at the suckling hour,
From knives whence trickle the sweetness of fruit,
From midwives' knives which cut umbilical cords,
And from conquerors' knives chewing light.
His sail, moist like the moon;
Strong like a stone;
Swift like the twinkle of an eye.
Green like spring-
His sail, red with a dye of blood
Is like the sail of a child's boat,
Made from the pages of a book which he tore apart,
Filling, from its contents, the river with boats.
It is like Columbus' sail at sea,
Like Fate.
Lorca t
by Mahmud Darwish
Forgive me, 0 flowers of blood
That I dare address myself to you.
A sun, 0 Lorca, is in your hands,
And a cross clad in the fire of a poem.
They make nocturnal pilgrimage to you,
The most beautiful knights,
With martyred men and martyred women.
Such is the poet: an earthquake, a torrent of rain,
A hurricane. When he rumbles
The roads whisper to each other:
*
From 'Unshu7dat al-Matar (The Rain Song, 1960).
t From Awraq Zaytuin (Olive Leaves, 1964).
252 TWQ 10(4) October 1989/ISSN
0143-6597/89.
$1.25
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Sat, 3 May 2014 23:31:54 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
LORCA AND ARABIC POETRY
'His footsteps will pass this way,
Disperse, 0 stones!'
Such is the poet: music; a chanted prayer;
A breeze when he whispers.
He takes a beautiful girl with the gentleness of a god.
And to him the moons are a nest when he rests.
Spain is still the most wretched of mothers;
She let down her hair on her shoulders
And on the olive branches of a dark evening
She hung her swords.
At night the guitar player roams the roads
Singing in secret.
With your poems, 0 Lorca, he gathers charities
From the eyes of the poor.
The black eyes in Spain stare hard,
And mute is the speech of love.
A grave will the poet dig in his hands
If he utters a word.
Forgetfulness has forgot to erase your radiant blood
And thus in blood were covered the smiles of the moon.
The noblest of swords is a song of your composition;
A song about the gypsies.
The latest news from Madrid:
'The patient are sated with patience,'
Says the Wound. 'Julian was shot at night,
But the orange blossoms still diffuse their scent.'
The best news from Madrid
Will come tomorrow.
Lorca *
by 5aldh
'Abd al-Sabiur
Lorca is a fountain in a square;
A shady place for children at noon to repose;
A gypsy song;
A golden sun;
A summer night blessed;
A woman bearing twins;
A white lily
Rubbing its cheeks in the water;
Tower bells
*
From AhlIm al-Fdris al QadTm (Dreams of the Ancient Knight, 1964).
253
THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY
In the belly of a fog
Near the solitary star;
Sometimes they sing and sometimes they sigh;
The leaves of Palm-Sunday;
Sugar candy;
A heart filled with limpid light;
Transparent ribs;
A naked chest of foam and smoke;
A banner for the brave.
Lorca is sweet like the harvest of sated bees;
Bitter like the sweet waters of the sea;
And thirsty like its waves.
On a still summer night
The poet became a legend.
The petty guards killed him.
The petty guards killed him.
He lay in a heap; a wound above the hill.
A decayed skull choked
With the blood of a weary heart,
And in the dew rusted away
The wooden body
And the buried hat.
As for the words sweet and bitter,
They flowed in a stream
Which began where you fell
And where with dust
Your mouth was filled
Until it slumbered in God's angry bosom,
Begging Him to forgive some stupid guards
Who killed the last of the Lord's sons.
Elegies of Lorca
*
by 'Abd al- Wahhdb al-BayatT
I
The boar gores the belly of the stag.
On his bed Enkidu dies,
Sad and forlorn,
As a worm dies in mud.
The fate of Luqman befell him in the end,
And the fate of that seventh eagle of his.
The acts of this play are now complete:
Neither light nor life will you again greet.
For fair Nature has destined men to die
And for herself kept the living flame through the sequence of seasons.
*
From Al-Mawtfial-I.ayat (Death in Life, 1968).
254
What, 0 queen of mine, can I say of my demise,
When the blue flame
I have not seen and to its distant parts have not been?
II
A city is enchanted,
On a river of silver and lemon erected:
No man is born at her thousand portals
And no man meets the fate of all mortals.
Surrounding her is a wall of gold,
And shielding her from wind an olive wood.
I saw her-worms
Eating my face, in my blocked and decayed grave.
'Shall I return?' I said to Mother Earth.
She laughed, shook off me the mantle of worms
And rubbed my face with an abundance of light.
I went back to my city, youthful and bedazzled
Galloping on the back of my green wooden horse.
At her thousand portals I yelled,
But together slumber had tied eye-lids
And the enchanted city drowned
In blood and smoke.
III
The sweet-scented lady
With the black eyes and ear-rings
Has herself adorned with lime leaves and with blossoms,
And with the water of the roses of fire
And the rain-drops of dawn has herself perfumed.
O Granada of happy childhood:
A paper-kite, a poem
Strung to this light
And rocking above the wall!
O Granada of the innocent days!
Eagerly she throws away her burden of the wind and of the stars,
She lies under the snowflakes on roof-tiles
Pointing in fear at her black hills
Whence on the backs of the horses of Death
Came the warring brothers
And sunk this house in blood.
IV
A bull of silk and velvet black
Bellows in the arena behind the horseman's back.
Its horns rise in the air,
Chasing the evening star
And stabbing the enchanted horseman.
There he lies with his broken sword,
Blood-besmeared, in the light:
255
Two red mouths, agape;
Red anemones.
At the foot of the mountain of superstition
Blood covers a willow tree.
O red fountain!
There is no henna in the markets of Madrid
Rub, I pray thee, with this blood the hands of my love.
O cry of a clownish crowd!
There he dies,
Whilst the bull, pierced in the arena, bellows full-throated.
V
To wash away the shame of forced death
He thrust the point of the sword
Into the heart of this night.
He fought till death
From street to street.
The villains caught up with him
And in his body planted daggers;
They cut the string which quivered in the sky-
The green kite of infancy
Has fallen in the trenches of the enemy.
And orphaned Granada
Is now a slave for sale.
Who would buy 'A'isha? Who would buy the Phoenix?
A Babylonian princess captive
With ear-rings from the gold of the city enchanted-
Who would buy the princess?
VI
The city of necessity
Heralds the world and man.
Under the sky of her bare summer
I face loss and legend,
I face forgetfulness.
O perpetual flux!
The recurrent copies
In this big machine
Are eaten into by the rats.
O Parrot of the besotted King! 0 Mistress of the Sultan!
Climb the walls of museums!
Make love to the reptiles!
Gamble with the head of this rebel!
There he is besieged from street to street
Chased by daggers.
256
Introduction
These four poems in translation 1 exemplify a widespread interest on the part
of modern Arab poets in the Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936).
The poems have been selected because they are all explicitly devoted to Lorca,
both in title and subject-matter. The Spanish poet is, however, invoked-
whether by name or by association with his life or art-in innumerable other
Arabic poems, a phenomenon which, invites extensive study, and which this
article will briefly explore.2
The composers of these poems are all eminent masters of the modernist
movement in Arabic poetry, who started to write (with the exception of
Mahmud Darwish who is of a younger generation) in the late 1940s or early
1950s, and reached their artistic maturity in the 1960s (incidentally, the period
to which all four poems belong). Of the four poets, two (Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
and 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati) are Iraqi, while Darwish is Palestinian, and
Salah 'Abd al-Sabiir is Egyptian. This national diversity (within the boundaries
of Arabic culture) in itself suggests that the Arab interest in Lorca extends
beyond individual affinities on the part of particular poets, into the realms of
a literary phenomenon.
The meaning of Lorca to Arab poets cannot be explored without some
acquaintance both with the life and art of the Spanish poet (and more import-
antly, the circumstances of his violent and premature death at the hands of the
fascist Right in Spain), and with the socio-political background and concerns
of modern Arabic poetry. Closer examination of the four individual poems
will then serve to illustrate the way in which Lorca was regarded by the Arab
poets.
Lorca against fascism
Lorca was executed by Nationalist forces outside his native Granada on the
morning of 19 August 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-
1939). Already a legendary figure in his life, his abrupt and bloody death at the
age of thirty-eight could only have served to lift him to a still higher mythical
plane. Lorca's poetry, with its surrealism, evocation of folk verse, sensuality
and creation of its own mythology, does not lend itself readily to political inter-
pretation. In the words of one critic, Lorca's work has 'no direct political
meaning ... The masses and what moved them as such did not interest him
. . .' 3This view seems to be upheld by the poet's own dictum: 'I'll never be a
politician, never! Like all the true poets I'm a revolutionary, but a politician-
never!'4 Ian Gibson, Lorca's biographer, tells us that the poet was 'a liberal in
the broadest sense of the word' and that, unlike many of his fellow-writers,
'he
never joined a political party or identified himself with any particular left-wing
group . . .5
257
Thus a purely 'artistic' reading of the poet's work coupled with an all too
literal adoption of the above statements might leave us wondering why the
Nationalists cared to murder Lorca and why he became an emblem for the
martyred poet-rebel to Arab poets and other intellectuals the world over. But
it must be remembered that while Lorca stood aloof from direct political
action, he saw himself as a 'revolutionary' in the manner of 'all true poets'. One
sense in which his revolutionary nature can be understood is his identification
in his early poetry with Granada's persecuted groups: Jews, Moors, negroes
and gypsies.6 One scholar remarks not irrelevantly in this connection that,
when Lorca visited the USA in 1929, 'the only part of New York he really
liked was the negro part, Harlem'.7 His revolutionariness was of a visionary
kind; the kind which touched the essence of human pathos without visibly
associating itself with this or that cause or group. In his poem 'Cicada' written
in 1918, he says:
May my blood on the field
Be sweet rosy loam
Where tired labourers
Sink their hoes.8
In another poem, 'Cantos Nuevos' (New Songs), included in his first collection,
Libro de Poemas (1921), he writes:
I thirst for fragrance and laughs,
I thirst for new songs
Free of moons or lilies
And free of withered amours.
A song of tomorrow that will agitate
The tranquil waters
Of the future. And will fill with hope
Its ripples and its slime.
A song reaching the spirit of things,
And the spirit of the winds,
A song finally resting in the joy
Of the eternal heart.9
Lorca's sympathy for the 'tired field-labourers', his rejection of romanticism,
and his 'seditious' song about 'agitating the tranquil waters of the future' will
probably do very little to qualify him as the author of left-wing political mani-
festoes. Their 'revolutionary' content may, however, be best understood in the
light of Stephen Spender's words: 'Poetry which is not written in order to
advance any particular set of political opinions may yet be profoundly
political.' 10
Lorca's major tragic dramas-Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934) and The
258
House of Bernarda Alba (1936)-which all take as their subject frustrated
womanhood, are also, and perhaps more importantly, powerful metaphors of
the triumph of death over life. Seen as such, and within the socio-political
context of Spain at the time of their writing, they are certainly political, if only
in the Spenderian sense. In retrospect, they also proved to have been prophetic
of the final triumph of fascism (that is, death) in Spain. Reluctant as Lorca
was to indulge in direct political argument, especially in his art, he can some-
times let slip remarks which point unequivocally to where his sympathies lie.
In The House of Bernarda Alba, the following conversation takes place between
two of the house maids:
Poncia: All we have is our hands and a hole in God's earth.
Servant: And that's the only earth they'll [the land-owning class] ever leave to us-to
us who have nothing! 1 1
On the other hand, Bernarda, the mistress of the house, remarks to herself on
one occasion that 'the poor are like animals-they seem to be made of different
stuff'. And on another occasion, she rebukes Poncia, her servant: 'Work and
keep your mouth shut. The duty of all who work for a living.'
12
However much Lorca may have thought himself above politics, in the fever-
ish period leading up to the Spanish Civil War when it was becoming increas-
ingly necessary for intellectuals to determine clearly which side they stood on,
he appears finally to have been politicised malgre lui. Ian Gibson considers it
indisputable that Lorca took part, in the months before the outbreak of the
civil war, in gatherings of a markedly anti-fascist and Republican character.13
In an interview given to a Madrid daily newspaper on 1 April 1936, the poet
said:
... The day when hunger is eradicated there is going to be the greatest spiritual ex-
plosion the world has ever seen. We will never be able to picture the joy that will erupt
when the Green Revolution comes. I'm talking like a real Socialist, arent' I? 14
A month later, the May Day issue of a weekly magazine published this message
from him:
I send my affectionate greetings to all the workers of Spain, united on this May 1st by
a passionate desire for a more just society. 1
5
Again, in the last interview he gave before his death, it is very interesting to
see how he almost inadvertently defines his political position in the course of
speaking about his artistic creed:
The idea of art for art's sake is something that would be cruel if it weren't, fortunately,
so ridiculous. No decent person believes any longer in all that nonsense about pure art,
art for art's sake. At this dramatic point in time, the artist should laugh and cry with
the people. We must put down the bunch of lilies and bury ourselves up to the waist in
mud to help those who are looking for lilies .. 16
259
Where the complexity of Lorca's art may have baffled the Nationalist forces
of reaction, such explicit pronouncements (coupled with his anti-Catholicism)
would have defined his political position for them only too sharply. Signifi-
cantly, the true revolutionary character of his art seems not to have been lost
on the Spanish masses who, despite their illiteracy, learnt his songs by heart.
An eye-witness of the civil war reports that 'the tunes and rhymes of his simple
little songs became war songs of the "Reds".' 17 The same scholar tries to
explain this phenomenon in the following terms:
For a great part of his work is 'popular' in the sense that it touched his people as
though with the full charge of their own half-conscious feelings, intensified and trans-
formed through his art. The emotional forces he released became part of the shapeless
revolutionary movements of Spain whether he intended or not. Thus it was, I think,
inevitable that he was killed by obscure Fascist brutality and that his work became a
banner to the Spanish masses. 18
Thus it was also that some thirty years later, Lorca's poetry and, more import-
antly, his 'martyrdom', became a banner to a generation of Arab poets who
saw themselves, as he did, as 'revolutionaries' fighting on the side of the people
in a world still under the dominance of various kinds of fascism.
For those Arab poets who knew Lorca's work well enough to grasp the
extent of the Arabic influence on both his sensibility and his poetry (such as
al-Baydti, who is conversant with Spanish and has lived in Spain for many
years), the poet's expression of his deep reverence for the Arabic civilisation
which once flourished in Spain, and particularly in Granada, could only further
have endeared him to them, in the same measure as it must have infuriated his
enemies in the ultra-catholic, Nationalist camp at the time. In an interview
shortly before the outbreak of the civil war, Lorca was asked what he thought
of the fall of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. His reply was poign-
antly candid:
It was a disastrous event, even though they say the opposite in the schools. An admir-
able civilisation, and a poetry, architecture and delicacy unique in the world-all were
lost to give way to an impoverished, cowed town, a wasteland populated by the worst
bourgeoisie in Spain today.'
9
Poets and rebels
The history of much of the Arab world since the end of World War II has
been one of unceasing political and social turmoil. The struggle for national
independence from European colonialism gave way to the Palestinian question
and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which after four regional wars within a period
of forty years remains unsolved. Internally, the post-independence struggle to
create a new just, progressive and democratic social order was often thwarted
260
by opposing social forces, as the dream of democratic government and dignity
for the individual systematically fell victim to repressive dictatorial regimes.
The poets under discussion belonged to a generation who spent their child-
hood in the shadow of a global war only to reach their maturity during an
equally unsettling period of national contention and intellectual schism. Such
conditions call for choices to be made, and all four poets may be labelled
progressive leftists, with varying degrees of direct political involvement. Differ-
ent as their poetic styles and individual backgrounds are, they all share a
concern for the ordinary people, the down-trodden classes, the repressed in-
dividual. All hanker for social justice and political freedom, believing in their
poetic art as a means of achieving these lofty goals, and all express a sense of
mission; a vision of the poet-hero, the man of words become a man of
action-to the point of death if necessary. In this connection, Lorca seems to
have presented himself to them as the very embodiment of their high ideal. To
them, his best and most meaningful poem was not one of words; it was his
own death.
It is perhaps understandable that the Iraqi poet, Sayydb (1926-64), whose
persecution for his political beliefs ranged from imprisonment to exile, should
identify with Lorca. In his poem, 'Garcia Lorca', through a gamut of imagery
which mixes the mundane with the sublime, and the tender with the powerful,
he portrays the poet as a positive, unstoppable, all-encompassing force of life
moving forward with the inevitability of 'Fate' towards a new world and a
new future symbolised by 'Columbus' Sail'.
Surprisingly, the Palestinian, Mahmiid Darwish (born 1942), uses the same
technique of mixed imagery in his depiction of Lorca. Thus, the poet who is
an 'earthquake' and 'a hurricane' is also 'music' and 'a chanted prayer': the
effect is again of a larger-than-life, all-encompassing figure. In imagery which
evokes the poetic world of Lorca himself, Darwish brings in a favourite theme
among modern Arab poets in general, namely that of the 'poet' as a 'doer', or
the 'word' becoming 'action': 'The noblest of swords is a song of your composi-
tion.' On the other hand, Darwish's personal identification with Lorca, as
poet-fighter with poet-fighter, is parallelled by an implicit identification between
fascist-ruled Spain and Israeli-usurped Palestine. Though not mentioned by
name, we can read 'Palestine' each time Spain is cited or invoked. As in
Sayyab's poem, the final note here is a hopeful, forward-looking one:
The best news from Madrid [Jerusalem?]
Will come tomorrow.
Again, through an accumulation of images partly inspired by Lorca's poetic
repertoire, the Egyptian poet, 'Abd al-Sabuir (1931-81), builds up a picture
of
the Spanish bard as the quintessence of all that is positive
and beautiful in life.
All the more so to augment our sense of horror in the second section of the
poem, when all this life is reduced to 'a heap; a wound above the hill'. In the
261
end, the murdered poet is elevated into a Christ-figure. Thus, his death should
be seen by implication to redeem the world; the poem ends with the triumph
of love as the poet-Christ begs his heavenly Father to forgive his killers.
Al-Bayati's (born 1926) 'Elegies of Lorca' is ostensibly the longest and most
complex of all four poems, while Baydti himself is perhaps the one Arab poet
who has most assimilated the world of Lorca and repeatedly invoked it in his
own poetry for his own purposes. Commenting on the recurrence in his poetry
of traditional Lorcaesque imagery, Bayati has this to say:
The appearance of the Black Guard20 in my poetry coincides with the appearance in
reality of the Black Guard in the Arab World. Therefore its appearance in my poetry
should not be seen as necessarily being a borrowing from Lorca. But assuming that it
was so, then it must be said that it was a necessary borrowing which came at the right
time because the conditions which prevailed in Spain from the beginning of the thirties
resemble conditions in the Arab World, even though the details may be different.21
While this statement is extremely valuable for understanding the Lorcaesque
elements in Bayati's poetry, it is obviously equally relevant to the other poets
discussed here.
Another pronouncement by Baydti will be particularly helpful in appreciat-
ing his intentions in 'Elegies of Lorca'. In the introduction to the second
volume of his Diwan (collected poems, 1979), he writes:
Here I am searching in this enormous crowd
[humanity]-which
I cannot help but
love-for the mytho-historical hero to transform with a motion of the hand this sacred
straw and clay into flames of fire, into revolution. Indeed, I search while dreaming that
this very enormous crowd will itself become the mytho-historical hero.22
For Bayati, Lorca was certainly a manifestation of his yearned-for mytho-his-
torical hero; while a figure of historic reality, his ideals and his death transfer-
red him to the higher plane of myth. Hence BayatF's association of Lorca in
his poem with the Babylonian mythical hero, Enkidu, who figures in The Epic
of Gilgamesh. Enkidu is described in the epic as a wild human creature of the
steppes, of surpassing strength. He is at harmony with the beasts of the forest,
and delivers them from hunters' snares and other hazards. This symbol of life
and benign strength is destroyed by death, and his ghost comes back to describe
to his disconsolate friend, Gilgamesh, the horror of the underworld.23 It is in
these mournful terms, representing the triumph of death over life, that Baydti
sees the murder of Lorca.
Yet, within the framework of Bayati's vision heroes do not really die; they
pass on the flame of their ideals eternally.24 Thus, the mytho-historical hero,
the Enkidu-Lorca figure, comes back to 'the enchanted city' that is Granada
and, by extension, the world. It is as though Lorca were Enkidu, resurrected
to engage once more in combat with forces of darkness and death. But the
262
'city's eye-lids were tied with slumber'; the historic moment was not right, so
the resurrected hero has to die again.
The poem is clearly influenced (especially in section IV) by Lorca's great
elegy, Lament for Ignacio Sanchez
Mejias
(1935), in which the Spanish poet
sees in the murder by the bull of his bull-fighter friend a symbol of the triumph
of death over life. In its sense of utter grief, summed up by the line: 'And the
bull alone exultant!', Lorca's poem is very pessimistic. Into this sombreness,
Bayati introduces a flicker of light. For while his Enkidu-Lorca hero still dies
by the horns of the (fascist) bull, the bull itself is by no means 'exultant':
'Pierced in the arena, [it] bellows full-throated.'- Yet, the bull is not finally
killed; it is perhaps weakened by the heroic thrust, but lives on. Nor can it be
killed until what Bayati refers to above as 'the enormous crowd' and 'the
sacred clay and straw', and less flatteringly in the poem as the 'clownish crowd',
are transformed into revolutionaries worthy of their saviour-heroes. Hence his
angry cry at the end of the poem, in an attempt to shake his audience, 'the
enormous crowd', into self-liberating action:
O Parrot of the besotted King! 0 Mistress of the Sultan! ...
Gamble with the head of this rebel!
Different as their poetic techniques may be, all four poets examined here
seem to share the same vision of Lorca, in which he emerges as the epitome of
the ideal of the poet-rebel. Baydti seems to assign to both poets and rebels the
self-same role in the making of history; he describes them as 'the two birds of the
storm which foretell revolution and make it'.25 For Arab poets, Lorca, given
in the words of his brother, the 'interweaving of his life and work, [his] erasing
of the limits between life and fiction',26 represents a kind of Christ-figure able
to bring revolutionary redemption beyond historical and geographical limits,
equally relevant in Spain, Palestine, Iraq or indeed wherever the cause of Man
is at stake. Hence Bayt7i's factually, though not poetically, incorrect lines
(emphasis added):
Lorca is dying, is dead:
The Fascists executed him at
night by
the banks
of
the
Euphrates.27
In the idolisation of Lorca and the sense of utter grief at his death which
characterise Arab poetry on the subject, there is perhaps an element of vicari-
ous suffering tinged with a sense of guilt. It is as if Lorca had achieved what
Arab poets have shrunk from: he had crossed the fearful barrier between poet
and rebel, life and death.
Notes
I
All translations from the Arabic are by the author of this article.
2
For an informative skirmish in Arabic into the subject, see Ahmad 'Abd al-'Aziz, 'The Influence
of Federico Garcia Lorca on Contemporary Arabic Literature', Fusl 3(4) Cairo, 1983.
263
3
Arturo Barea, Lorca: the poet and his people, London: Faber & Faber, 1946, p 11. See also
Manuel Duran (ed.) Lorca: a collection of critical essays, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962, p 18.
4
Quoted in Ian Gibson, The Death of Lorca, London: W H Allen, 1973, p 40.
5
Ibid.
6 Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: the theatre beneath the sand, London: Marion Boyars, 1980, p 6.
7
M Duran, p 33.
8 Quoted in A Barea, pp 54 and 93.
9
See J L Gili (ed), Lorca, London: Penguin Books, 1971, pp 11-12.
10
Quoted in A Barea, pp 24-5.
Three Tragedies of Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Graham-Lujan and R L O'Connell,
London: Secker & Warburg, 1959, p 161.
12
Ibid, pp 163 and 193 respectively.
13
See I Gibson, p 39.
14
Ibid, p 40.
1
5 Ibid, p 39.
16
Ibid, p 42.
17
A Barea, p 12.
18
Ibid, p 11.
'9 Quoted in I Gibson, p 43. For a general discussion of the Arabic influence on Lorca's poetry
and sensibility, see Edwin Honig, Garcia Lorca, London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.
20 Bayati7s Black Guard immediately invokes Lorca's Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard in which
the Guards ride 'black' horses with 'black' horseshoes. To Lorca, the Spanish Civil Guard
(founded in 1844 to suppress banditry) was a brutal, anti-life, force of repression, their tradi-
tional victims being the gypsies who, by contrast, symbolised to Lorca the vitality and spon-
taneity of human nature. For more details see I Gibson, p 170; and also A Barea, p 17.
21
See Ahmed 'Abd al-'Aziz, p 287.
22
See Diwdn al-BayatT (2) Beirut: Dar al 'Awda, 1979, p 50.
23
See S H Hooke, Middle Eastern Mythology, London: Penguin Books, 1983, p 50.
24
See Diwan (2) Introduction, passim.
2 5 See Diwan (2) p
33.
26
See Three Tragedies of Federico Garcia Lorca, Introduction by Francisco Garcia Lorca, pp 4-5.
27
See Bayati's poem, 'Death in Granada', Diwan (2) p 334.
264

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RASHEED EL-ENANY

Poets and rebels: reflections of Lorca in modern

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