Federico Garcia Lorca was a Spanish poet, theater director, and playwright who, during his nineteen-year career, played a central and prominent role in the revival and rehabilitation of Spanish poetry and theater. He was a member of the Generation of ’27, a group of poets introducing Spanish Literature to the tenets of European movements. Lorca was also a painter, pianist, and composer. Critics have called this Spanish playwright the genius of geniuses for his enrichment of avant-garde art and his fight for freedom, and believe he was the world’s greatest tragedian of the 20th century.
Federico Garcia Lorca Biography
Federico García Lorca was the eldest child of a wealthy and educated family. He was born on June 5, 1898, in a small village in southern Spain. He lived in the same village until he was ten years old when he and his family moved to the city of Granada to continue their lives.
Federico García Lorca was unable to move or play until the age of four due to an unknown illness, so his childhood was spent immersed in the stories, songs, and legends of the gypsies of his village.
During this period, he became interested in music, influenced by his mother, who played the piano. However, at the age of eighteen, he gave up music and began writing poetry and stories.
Acquaintance with Salvador Dali
At the age of twenty, Federico Garcia Lorca went to Madrid to continue his studies in law and philosophy but left the university two years later. However, his presence in the academic atmosphere of the Spanish capital led to his acquaintance and close friendship with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, two popular original artists of the time.
Lorca’s close association and friendship with Salvador Dali introduced him to the Surrealist movement, and this acquaintance had a profound influence on the themes of the writer’s plays and poems in later years.
He published his first book of poetry at the age of twenty-two, and soon after, his name became known as a freedom-loving and left-wing poet.
Emigration & Later Returning Home
Federico Garcia Lorca decided to emigrate in his thirties, but after two years in the United States and Cuba, he returned to his native homeland, Spain.
The writer had become famous as a Marxist poet and playwright in the mid-1930s when his country was engulfed in civil war, which forced him to flee to his native village near Granada to escape the right-wing military.
During these years, many poems and plays by Federico Garcia Lorca were published, and some of his works were also performed on the theater stage.
Imprisonment & Death
In the summer of 1936, Lorca was working on creating two of his works, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War changed everything. On August 16, he was arrested by Nationalist forces in Granada and imprisoned without trial.
On the night of August 19, 1936, Lorca was taken to a remote area outside the city and was shot. The police later reported that Lorca was executed by fascist forces.
Federico Garcia Lorca Poems
In his early youth, after becoming acquainted with avant-garde art, Federico Garcia Lorca took a different approach to composing poetry and writing plays, and by combining different literary genres, he created his own passionate, poetic, folkloric, metaphorical, and tragic writing style.
During his short life of 38 years, Federico Garcia Lorca published dozens of plays and poetry collections, some of which became known as some of the most beloved literary works of the 20th century. The author wrote his first play, “The Butterfly’s Evil Spell,” in 1919, but his first officially published work was “The Book of Poems,” published in 1921. This book, which included a selection of Lorca’s poems up to the age of twenty-two, had an emotional, intense, and ironic tone and was full of poetic metaphors.
In the early 1920s, Federico Garcia Lorca, inspired by Spanish folk songs, Japanese haiku, and contemporary revolutionary poetry, experimented with composing short poems, which were published decades after his death in a book titled “Suites” written between 1920 and 1923.
At the age of twenty-two, influenced by his acquaintance with the famous Spanish composer and pianist, Manuel de Falla, Lorca composed a collection of poems entitled “Deep Song,” based on the songs of the gypsies of Granada that was published in 1931. He then studied the tradition of Spanish puppet theater, which led to the creation of the play “The Billy-Club Puppets”.
Federico Garcia Lorca then experimented with modernistic art and surrealism, influenced by Salvador Dali, and published plays such as “The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife” written 1926–30.
His time in the United States and Cuba led to the creation of “Poet in New York – Poeta en Nueva York,” a collection of poems whose dense, sometimes eerie imagery, as well as their frequent references to urban decay and social inequality, marked a departure from his earlier works. The collection recalls the works of Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, and T. S. Eliot and also pays homage to Walt Whitman.
Lorca became more popularized in 1928 with the publication of the book “Gypsy Ballads,” and at the same time, with the encouragement of the great Spanish painter Salvador Dali, he organized an exhibition of his paintings in Madrid. What made Federico Garcia Lorca even more famous was the publication of his book “Blood Wedding,” which was also performed on a stage in 1933.
Federico Garcia Lorca Famous Works
Federico Garcia Lorca holds an unassailable place in world literature and is considered the greatest poet and playwright in Spanish literature. “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” (Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías), written in1935 is Federico Garcia Lorca’s most famous work, written an elegy for his matador friend.
This long poem, considered one of the most brilliant elegies in the world, has four sections, and the phrase “at five o’clock in the evening” is repeated many times as a motif.
“Yerma,” along with “Blood Wedding” and “The House of Bernarda Alba,” are among the most famous dramatic works in the history of world literature. These three books have a socio-political theme, and their underlying theme is tragedy and the negation of dictatorship.
All three books are written in a poetic language and tone. Millions of copies have been sold in the world’s living languages and have been performed thousands of times on stages in different countries around the world.
“Lament for a Bullfighter,” written in 1935, is another best work of Federico Garcia Lorca. Each section of the poem is written in a different poetic meter, each verse addressing a different aspect of the wounds and death of a bullfighter who had been Lorca’s friend.
Federico Garcia Lorca among Iranian Poets
Federico Garcia Lorca is a very popular poet and playwright among Persian speakers and many translators, including Ahmad Shamlou, Najaf Daryabandari, Yadollah Royaee, and Ahmad Pouri.
Some of these poets have translated his poems and plays into Persian. Among them, Ahmad Shamlou’s translation and recitation of the poem “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” is very popular.
Final Word
Although he lived only thirty-eight years, this writer achieved such a place in literature and art that the Spanish government at the time erected a monument to him in 1986 at the site of his assassination. Federico Garcia Lorca was the most prominent Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century. A man whose works continue to influence writers and artists far and wide, speaking to audiences about the most important experiences and emotions in human life.
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