In a lecture in 1922, Lorca discusses the Oriental and European origins of “deep song” and how it has affected contemporary music. He then goes on to discuss its poetry. I originally picked this book up because of his role in surrealism, as he is the “Andalusian Dog” referenced by the film’s title, he was hated by Dali and Bunuel, as they thought he was a hack. Honestly, I don’t enjoy his poetry. But I do enjoy his lectures and his inspirations. He’s another example of that last generation of poets and artists who actually had educations to speak of, before the horrors of WWII led to the horrors of widespread undergrad degrees.
I remember where I was sitting when I began reading this. At the bar at Amherst Coffee, by the window. Perhaps not. Perhaps that’s only where I met Marta. I was reading, though, that’s true. I’d been to the Moan and Dove the night before, speaking to the bartender, and when I wound up sitting next to him at Amherst Coffee the next night, I asked Marisa for whatever he was having. A glass of scotch. We continued talking, I continued pretending to sip mine. And as soon as he left I gasped that I couldn’t drink anymore of this horrid stuff. She said “of course not! you need ice in there!” And from across the bar, Marta leaned over and asked if I wanted to taste her drink. I’d never met her before, but that embodies my entire experience with her, I suppose. That’s how she lives her life. And fortunately, I’d been reading Lorca and had fallen in love with the anonymous verses he includes in his lecture. I was interested in Spanish now, and here, before me, a girl, a poet from Asturias. It was winter and where I lived we had no heat, so she brought me back to her room at the top floor of one of Amherst’s mansions, dimly lit with string lights, where she had a space heater she’d borrowed from someone, and she put it in a paper bag, and with that I went home and would secretly plug it in at night and hide it under my bed (my bed was actually a table) during the day because my landlords didn’t allow space heaters. Anyway, as this poetry taught me how to mourn, so Marta taught me how to rejoice, how to live, and I can only conclude that my emotions were all born in Spain.
The poetry, even in translation, crushed me. I’d never read anything that affected me so deeply upon a first reading.
The moon has a halo;
my love has died.
Its focus is continually on unrequited love, and lost love, and death. But, I encourage you to read on through the rest of these fragments given by Lorca. And then consider the difference between the Andalusian deep song’s treatment of the subjects, and its treatment by Byron in his first volume of poetry and its stylized flowery mush, or Petrarch, both before and after Laura’s death, which, even as sonnets, seem painfully bent on avoiding any truth.
The difference is of personality, perhaps. The deep song verses are universal, they speak of the heart’s greatest longing, that which Byron and Petrach sought to expose or imply, but which for them, as for most, translation is feeble at best, or perhaps impossible at best, as it should never be attempted after years of translating Latin verse. The beauty and greatness is that it exposes the truth of life so elegantly because it does so concisely.
Cry, keep crying, eyes,
cry if you have cause.
It shouldn’t shame a man
to cry over a woman.
And how does Byron treat such pain over a woman? Like so:
When I dream that you love me, you’ll surely forgive;
Extend not your anger to sleep;
For in visions alone your affection can live,–
I rise, and it leaves me to weep.
Okay, well, I can read it, but I don’t feel it. And here’s another, from Petrarch, (who I really hope is burning in hell right now.)
Shouldn’t a fire reasonably be quenched
by all the water that my eyes pour forth?
Love–and I clearly should have sensed this sooner–
wants me distempered by a paradox,
and uses snares of such variety
that when I most believe my heart is free
he most entraps it with that lovely face.
How am I supposed to give a fuck, Petrarch?! Onward, as I can only rail on for so long about him. Tu Fu. Let’s consider what the orient can teach us, and see how it makes us feel:
Wavers. No word from those I love. Old.
Sick. Nothing but a lone boat. And
North of frontier passes–Tibetan horses. . . .
I lean on the railing, and tears come.
So, not the sorrow of heartbreak by a woman, but sorrow expressed concisely, in a way that we can understand even if we are not old, sick men. In the deep song examples, one of how it feels to be alone:
Only to the Earth
do I tell my troubles,
for nowhere in the world
do I find anyone to trust.
Finally, before moving on to the real treats, let’s look at a snippet by Tagore, from a land that Lorca says sent away the Gypsies in the first place, and which I’ve read was populated first by Persians, which will lead us back to verses from the Middle East in a moment:
There seem to be people all around me,
I can’t speak my heart in case they hear me.
Weeping is wasted here, it is stopped by walls,
My weeping always comes back to me.
Oh. Simply. We’ve been there. This is something felt. And now compare this to the anonymous deep song:
You will knock at my door.
Will will never get up to answer,
and you must hear me cry.
Both touch me, both treat the experience of anguish in such a way that we’ve lived, in a way that, in a sense, we live every day to some extent.
—
It doesn’t matter to me
if a bird in the poplar grove
skips from tree to tree.
—
Ah, I have lost the road
on this sad mountain.
Ah, I have lost the road.
Let me bring the sheep
for God’s sake into your cabin.
In the dense fog
I have lost the road.
Let me spent the night
in the cabin with you.
I lost the road
in the mountain mist.
Ah, I have lost the road!
—
Out in the sea
was a stone.
My girl sat down
to tell it her pains.
—
Every morning I go
to ask the rosemary
if love’s ills can be cured,
for I am dying.
—
I climbed up the wall.
The wind answered me:
“Why so many little sighs
if it is already too late?”
—
The wind cried
to see how big the wounds were
in my heart.
—
I fell in love with the air,
the air of a woman,
and since a woman is air,
in the air I stayed.
—
I’m jealous of the breeze
that blows on your face.
If the breeze were a man,
I would kill him.
—
I’m not afraid of the galleys.
If I had to row, I’d do it.
I’m only afraid the wind
that blows out of your bay.
—
At night I go to the courtyard
and cry my heart out,
to see I love you so much
and you love me not at all.
—
When you see me cry,
don’t take away my handkerchief,
for I am in deep pain,
and crying I feel better.
—
If my heart
had windowpanes of glass,
you’d look inside and see it
crying drops of blood.
—
Siraj-al-Warak:
The turtledove that with her complaints
keeps me from sleep
has a breast that burns like mine,
with living fire.
Ibn Sa’id:
To console me my friends say
visit your mistress’s tomb.
Has she a tomb, I ask,
other than in my breast?
Hafiz:
Even if she did not love me,
I would trade
the whole globe of the earth
for one hair from her tress.
Hafiz:
My heart has been ensnared
in your black tresses since childhood.
Not until death
will a bond so wonderful be undone.
—
If I should happen to die,
I order you,
tie up my hands
with your black tresses.
—
Hafiz:
I weep endlessly: you are gone.
But what use is all my longing
if the wind will not carry my sighs
to your ears
—
I sigh into the wind,
Ay, poor me!
But nobody catches my sighs!
—
Hafiz:
Since you stopped listening
to the echo of my voice,
my heart has been plunged in pain.
It sends jets of burning blood
to my eyes.
—
Whenever I look at the place
where I used to court you,
my poor eyes begin
crying drops of blood.
—
It was a love
I must not remember,
for my poor heart is weeping
drops of blood.
arts & fetters 