Duende, The

It seems as if the duende arrives when a poet hits the far limits of art, the outer limits of self. It's as if as artists we descend into the wilderness of ourselves and through that struggle reach out to others. "Wake up. Be still. Listen. Sit up in your bed": these are characteristic Lorcaesque imperatives. They are Lorca's feverish warnings. Many of his greatest poems are an insomniac's nocturnes. His sleepless voice is an urgent message from the dark; as in "City that Does Not Sleep" (a nightsong of Brooklyn Bridge) which relies on large, incantatory free-verse rhythms and repetitions to create a sense of human unreality, of the torments of consciousness, of suffering without end:

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody,

nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl

about their cabins

The living iguanas will come to bite the men

who do not dream,

and the man who rushes out with his spirit

broken will meet on the streetcorner

the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the

tender protest of the stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

In the graveyard far off there is a corpse

who has moaned for three years

because of a dry countryside in his knee;

and that boy they buried this morning cried so

much

it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep

him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!

We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist

earth

or we climb to the knife-edge of the snow with

the voices of the dead dahlias.

But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not

exist;

flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths

in a thicket of new veins,

and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain

forever

and whoever is afraid of death will carry it

on his shoulders.

(translated by Robert Bly)

New York becomes a prototype of the twentiethcentury urban world as the poet inveighs against the alienation from nature and anthropocentrism of city life, the terrible rootlessness of the crowds, the "painful slavery of both men and machines," the racism, the social injustice, and the indifference to suffering which seems to permeate the very atmosphere.

It's as if the enormous size, the density, and the random violence of America demanded from Lorca a metaphysical adjustment. He continually enjoins his listeners to wake up and pay attention to the wreckage, to be alert to an almost disembodied and conceptual philosophical unhappiness:

Look at the concrete shapes in search of,their

void.

Lost dogs and half-eaten apples.

Look at this sad fossil world, with its anxiety

and anguish,

a world that can't find the rhythm of its very

first sob.

(translated by Greg Simon and Steven White)

"Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream," Lorca declares in his "Ode to Walt Whitman": "This is the world, my friend, agony, agony." Lorca's poetry is burnished by memories, by an exalted desire for transfiguration ("And I on the roof's edge,/ what a burning angel I look for and am!") and by a dangerous regressive loss of self:

I want to cry because I feel like it