Books: Raw Whiskey

LAMENT FOR THE DEATH OF A BULLFIGHTER AND OTHER POEMS—Federico Garcia Lorca—English translation by A. L. Lloyd—Oxford University Press ($2.50).

With the sorrowing lyrics of James Joyce (see above), U. S. readers last week could compare a noted poem in a professionally heartbroken tradition. Ballads in the styles called cante hondo and cante flamenco had been made up and sung by guitarristas in Andalusia for centuries before Spanish poets began consciously to exploit their simple metres and barbaric flair. In Spain and in Europe at large the acknowledged master of this school was Federico Garcia Lorca, a musician and theatrical producer who was shot by Fascist troops in Granada last year. His best poem, written in 1935, was the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejias (a bull-fighter). Readers who have hair that is capable of rising will feel scalped at several points in this harshly sensuous, musically calculated and fiercely whole-hog song of death, even in the literal translation which A. L. Lloyd prints along with the original Spanish.

Now is Ignacio the high-born stretched on the stone . . . Now he is finished. The rain enters his mouth. Like mad, his breath rushes from his staved-in chest, and Love, drenched in tears of snow, thaws upon the peaks of the cattle-lands. What do they say? Here lies a stinking silence. . . .

Tasted after this raw whiskey of grief. Irishman Joyce’s poems will seem well aged.