Duende, The

I wish I'd been in Buenos Aires on October zo, 1933, when Federico Garcia Lorca invoked the Dionysian spirit of art and delivered a lecture which he called "Juego y teoria del duende." Lorca was testifying to his own poetic universe, as his biographer Ian Gibson has recognized. It would have been electrifying to hear him because on that night, addressing the members of the Friends of Art Club, the spirit of artistic mystery entered the room. It moved at the speed of Lorca's voice and burned like incense in the rich air. It was palpable to the audience, as if Lorca had thrown open the windows so that everyone present could hear the primitive wing beats shuddering in the darkness outside. The floor shifted a little under everyone's feet. The lamps trembled. Thinking about it now, 66 years later, I can still see the stammering flames coming off the typescript of Lorca's talk. I feel the ancient heat.

(I also wish I'd been at the Buenos Aires PEN Club one month later when Lorca and Neruda staged a happening at a luncheon in their honor. They took a lesson out of bullfighting and improvised a speech about the great Nicaraguan modernist Ruben Dario which they delivered alternately from different sides of the table. "Ladies . . ," Neruda began, " . . . and gentlemen," Lorca continued: "In bullfighting there is what is known as 'bullfighting al alimon,' in which two toreros, holding one cape between them, outwit the bull together." The virtuoso performance at first bewildered and then delighted the audience as the joyous spirit of praise started darting back and forth across the room. Dario was a poet both of Spain and of the Americas, and Lorca and Neruda were magically linking themselves through him, as if by electrical impulses.)

Whoever speaks or writes about the duende should begin by invoking the crucial aid and spirit of this chthonic figure-as Lorca did whenever he read aloud from the manuscript of Poet in New York. The power of mystery needs to be welcomed into the room. ("Only mystery enables us to live," Lorca wrote at the bottom of one of his drawings: "Only mystery.") Lorca considered a poetry reading not an entertainment but a struggle, a hand-to-hand combat with a complacent mass, an exposure of his very flesh. He was bewildered by indifference. He understood his own vulnerability, and wanted badly to communicate to strangers: "Let us agree that one of man's most beautiful postures is that of St. Sebastian," he said:

Well, then, before reading poems aloud before many creatures, the first thing one must do is to invoke the duende. That is the only way that everybody will immediately succeed at the hard task of understanding metaphor (without depending on intelligence or critical apparatus), and be able to hunt, at the speed of the voice, the rhythmic design of the poem.

(from Poet in New York)

Lorca's difficult new poems were filled with what he called hecho poetico (the "poetic fact"), images that followed a strange inner logic "of emotion and of poetic architecture," metaphors that arose so quickly that in order to be understood they demanded a sympathetic attentiveness, a capacity for rapid association, for structured reverie, and a willing suspension of disbelief. Lorca's mode of thinking has sometimes been confused with Surrealism, though he rejected psychic automatism as a technique and insisted on "the strictest self-awareness" in his creation of images which have an emotive poetic logic rather than a disembodied rational logic. "If it is true that I am a poet by the grace of God-or of the devil," he told Gerardo Diego in I932, "I am also a poet by virtue of technique and effort." Lorca wanted "sharp profiles and visible mystery," and his imagery was meant as an intersecting point of contact between his inner and outer worlds. He also sought a poetry saturated with what Keats called "the true voice of feeling," and this further distinguished him from the French Surrealists. He said, "The great artists of the south of Spain, whether Gypsy or flamenco, whether they sing, dance, or play, know that no emotion is possible unless the duende comes."

What Lorca meant by the poetic fact seems akin to what Hart Crane meant when he spoke of finding "a logic of metaphor" beyond the boundaries of "so-called pure logic." Crane, too, was organizing poems through the "emotional dynamics" of sudden conjunctions, and a concept of duende would have helped readers to follow his mode of poetic thinking, his systematic disordering of the senses, his strategic verbal extravagances and innovative methods. "As for me, I can explain nothing," Lorca said, "but stammer with the fire that burns inside me, and the life that has been bestowed upon me." It was only when the duende was present, Lorca believed, that one could be sure of being loved and understood.

I first encountered Lorca's piece in Ben Belitt's version "The Duende: Theory and Divertissement," which appeared as one of the appendices to his translation of Poet in New York (I955). It helped guide me through many anguished nights in my midtwenties. Belitt's useful version was supplanted 25 years later by Christopher Maurer's definitive "Play and Theory of the Duende," which was translated from the typewritten manuscript, corrected by the poet, in the Lorca family archives. It is one of the centerpieces of Maurer's stimulating selection of Lorca's essays, lectures, and readings, Deep Song and Other Prose (1980).