Duende, The

The duende (the etymology comes from duen de casa, "lord of the house") has generally been considered in Spanish folklore something like a household version of the Yiddish dybbuk, a hobgoblin, a sly poltergeist-like trickster who meddles and stirs up trouble. (There are two such whimsical sprites in Lorca's tragic farce, The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belissa in the Garden.) But in Andalusia, as Maurer points out, "the word duende is also applied to the ineffable mysterious charm of certain gifted people, especially flamenco singers. The Andalusian says that a cantaor has duende."

Lorca uses the word duende in a special Andalusian sense as a term for the obscure power and penetrating inspiration of art. He described it, quoting Goethe on Paganini, as "a mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains." For him, the concept of duende, which could never be entirely pinned down or rationalized away, was associated with the spirit of earth, with visible anguish, irrational desire, demonic enthusiasm, and a fascination with death. Lorca liked to repeat the Gypsy singer Manuel Torre's statement that "All that has black sounds has duende." (Torre sang canto jondo or deep song naturally, from his chest instead of his throat, and Lorca once overheard him saying, "What you must search for, and find, is the black torso of the Pharaoh.")

The duende rises up through the body. It burns through the soles of a dancer's feet, or expands in the torso of a singer. It courses through the blood and breaks through a poet's back like a pair of wings. It is risky and deathward leaning. "The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible," Lorca says. Duende, then, means something like artistic inspiration in the presence of death. It has an element of mortal panic and fear. It speaks to an art that touches and transfigures death, that woos and evades it, as when Lorca concludes his early poem "Malaguena": "La muerte/ entra y sale,/ y sale y entra/ la muerte/ de la taberna."

Death

is coming in and leaving

the tavern,

death

leaving and coming in.

(translated by Robert Bly)

There are countries that draw the curtains on death, that treat death as a finality roped off from the rest of life, Lorca said, but Spain is a country where the curtains are flung open, the ropes are cut, and death is invited into the room, like the lemon-colored light squeezed from dawn. "A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than any place else in the world," Lorca said. Maybe he was right. So, too, it seems to me, there are entire poems, and sometimes certain moments in poems, when death arrives and floods the lyric with its own mysterious spirit. It breathes out like a wind in the sails, and fills the poem with the majesty of the incomprehensible.

There are a few poems that come immediately to mind, that seem touched by the magical claw of death itself: Cesar Vallejo's "Black Stone Lying on a White Stone" ("I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,/ on some day I can already remember"), Miguel de Unamuno's "It is Night, in My Study" ("and it is as if around me circled/cautious death"), Pablo Neruda's "Nothing but Death":