About Federico Garcia Lorca
Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet and writer, born in Fuente Vaqueros (Granada). After having studied Law, Philosophy and Literature and Music in Granada, in 1919 he moved to Madrid, to the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he became friends with numerous writers and artists (Juan Ramón Jiménez, Dalí, Buñuel, etc.). At this time, He had already published his first work in 1918, Impressions and landscapes, accounts of travels made through Andalusia and Castile. From 1920, he began to write for the theater. Poems and dramatic works follow one another until the painful crisis he went through from 1926 to 1929, the year in which, after having developed a brilliant activity as a lecturer, he moved to the United States. Returning to Spain in 1930, he experienced a period of intense creation: musical adaptations and harmonizations (he was a great friend of Manuel de Falla), conferences, elaboration of poems and dramatic works, etc. In 1932, he founded "La Barraca", a university company that set out to take classical and current theater to the towns of Spain. In 1933, the performance of Blood Wedding in Madrid was a tremendous triumph. After a stay in Argentina, where his plays were acclaimed, he oriented, in poetry, towards a more pressing technique and, in the theater, towards a more social inspiration. Shortly before the civil war, he directed the rehearsals of his play When Five Years Pass (Así que pasen cinco años) and concluded the writing of La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba). Arrested by the Francoists in Granada, he was shot on August 19, 1936, at the age of thirty-seven.A leading figure of the "Generation of '27" (so called in honor of the tercentenary of Góngora's death), Federico García Lorca managed to fuse the most diverse influences in his work, from that of the romancero to that of Surrealism, passing through those of the Baroque or Classicism. In his early works (Book of Poems, 1921), he seems primarily concerned with solving his inner mysteries. Later, in the Canciones (1921-1924) or in the Poema del cante jando (1921-1922), he incorporates folkloric elements, treated in the sense of a pathetic stylization. The eighteen poems of the Romancero gitano (1928) constitute a lyrical and mythical epic for the glory of Andalusia. Poet in New York (1929-1930) underlines the cruelty of the big city, the "geometry and anguish" of a world in which the power of money, social injustice and dehumanization prevail: New York is the symbol of despair and death. Crying for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935) confirms the omnipresence of licking. Divan del tamaril (1936) explores the themes of Andalusian Spanish-Arabic poetry.
An exceptional poet, García Lorca is also a great playwright who knew how to express, at the same time, his inner tears and social alienation. There are numerous plays that stage the struggle of women to get out of the closed world that imprisons them: Mariana Pineda (1925), Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934), Doña Rosita la soltera (1935). Specifically, The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), subtitled "drama of women in the villages of Spain", presents five daughters subjected to the cult of their dead father and the tyranny of their mother. In the face of such slavery, García I.orea proclaims an existence based on risk and love, on openness to the outside world, on the joint development of body and spirit, of the material and the spiritual. Such is the lesson that can be drawn, in particular, from the two most complex and hermetic pieces of his production: El público (1929-1930) and When Five Years Pass (Así que pasen cinco años) (1931). Other outstanding titles of his theatrical work are the farces The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife (1930) and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden (1933), as well as his light-hearted puppet pieces The Billy-Club Puppets (Los títeres de Cachiporra) and The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal (Retablillo de Don Cristóbal).
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