Tenses of the Truth

FIVE PLAYS by Federico Garcia Lorca. 246 pages. New Directions. $4.95.

Early one morning in the summer of 1936, Federico Garcia Lorca was taken to a field outside the old Moorish city of Granada and shot by a Falangist firing squad. This was ordered, it now seems possible, not because Lorca had any political affiliations but because Manuel Fernandez Montesinos, the Socialist mayor of Granada, was his brother-in-law. His death was a reminder that in the Spain of the time, virtually any consideration could expose a man to a firing squad from either side. Lorca was buried in a shallow, unmarked grave on a hillside beside several thousand other victims of the Falangist terror. He had just turned 38.

Lorca's dramatic death left him a reputation as a revolutionary--which he was not--and gave rise to a Lorca cult that did him no service by drawing attention away from his works and for cusing it on his life. He was, in fact, a lyric poet of great talent--although many critics would argue that either Antonio Machado or Miguel Hernandez among his contemporaries was a finer writer. Lorca was a romantic, and what he restored to the literature of Spain was the tragic vision that Cervantes understood and that left Hemingway mesmerized. "It is Spanish," said Actress Aurora Bautista of Lorca's greatest play, Yerma. "We are unused to things Spanish." And unused, too, to the terrible directness of vision that illuminated Lorca's best writing, as in his poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, in which he speaks of the death of a matador who died in a goring:

death laid eggs in the wound

at five in the afternoon . . .

From far off the gangrene is now coming

at five in the afternoon.

Lily trumpet around his green groins

at five in the afternoon.

His wounds were burning like suns

at five in the afternoon,

and the crowd was breaking the windows . . .

Passion & Loathing. Lorca wrote 13 plays, but he was not in any usual sense a playwright. His best works--Yerma, Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba--are really prose poems, and no one of them has the kind of dramat ic power that seals an audience in its seat. Yerma is the story of a young peasant woman who yearns so passionately for a child that she finally murders her sterile husband, crying "But I have killed my son!" Blood Wedding is a study of one of the terrible family feuds that used to be waged generation after generation in rural Spain. Bernarda Alba is the tale of a widowed mother and her five unmarried daughters living in mutual loathing in a Spanish village. The interest in all of them is less in the story than in the powerful, passionate poetry in which it is told.

All of them, consequently, read better than they play, and the same is true of this first collection in English of the Lorca "comedies." Two of the five were written by Lorca when he was in his teens for presentation in the puppet theater that he had built for the entertainment of neighborhood children. Of the others, only one is a genuinely major work, Dona Rosita, the Spinster, which Lorca wrote two years before his death.

Dying Wolf. In Dona Rosita's three acts very little happens onstage: a woman begins sewing the trousseau for her wedding, the man she is engaged to leaves for America and does not return; the woman grows old in the delusion that some day he will come back to her. Time is the real protagonist. Language gives the play its life. "Everything is finished," says the old maid. "Yet I go to bed and get up again with the most terrible of all feelings--the feeling of having hope. Hope pursues me, encircles me, bites me; like a dying wolf tightening his grip for the last time."

Reality, said Lorca, is prose. But the truth, "timeless, all tenses," is poetry. The writing of poetry he thought of as "an opening of the veins." That concept led him to occasional overwriting. But it also led him to a style more powerful in its music, more compelling in its imagery than that of any other Spanish writer of his time.

*So much so that for twelve years after his death, publication of his name was forbidden in Spain.

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