The New York Public Library on 42nd St. (the big one next to Bryant Park with the two big lions sitting in front) has a special free exhibit about one of Spain’s most famous poets: Federico Garcia Lorca. He came to New York in 1929 to study English as a Second Language and also learn about America. They have his letters, manuscripts, and drawings on display, as well as his guitar and passport.
Since it’s National Poetry Month, why not go check it out? It’s going to be there till July 20th.
The exhibit’s name is Back Tomorrow: Federico García Lorca / Poet in New York. From the NYPL website:
In June 1929, at a time when young writers and painters dreamed of living in Paris, Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), Spain’s greatest modern poet and playwright, broke boldly with tradition and sailed for New York. His nine months here, followed by three months in Havana, changed his vision of poetry, the theater, and the social role of the artist.
Lorca came to New York to study English but devoted himself instead to writing Poet in New York, a howl of protest against racial bigotry, mindless consumption, and the adoration of technology. “What we call civilization, he called slime and wire,” the critic V. S. Pritchett once wrote. But Lorca’s book reaches beyond New York—“this maddening, boisterous Babel”—into the depths of the psyche, in a search for wholeness and redemption.
In 1936, the poet left the manuscript of Poet in New York on the desk of his Madrid publisher with a note saying he would be “back tomorrow,” probably to discuss final details. He never returned. Weeks later, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was brutally murdered by fascist elements in Granada, his body thrown into an unmarked mass grave. The book was published posthumously in 1940, but the manuscript mysteriously disappeared, lost to scholars for decades. The Fundación Federico García Lorca in Madrid and The New York Public Library exhibit it now for the first time, together with drawings, photographs, letters, and mementos—traces of a Poet in New York . . . and of New York in a poet.
To get more information, click here.
And here’s one of his poems about New York, translated into English:
Dawn by Federico Garcia Lorca
Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.The light is buried under chains and noises
in the impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.
Dawn in