Apocryphal Lorca

Apocryphal Lorca Translation, Parody, Kitsch

by Jonathan Mayhew

University of Chicago Press, 2009
Cloth: 978-0-226-51203-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-51205-1
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) had enormous impact on the generation of American poets who came of age during the cold war, from Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley and Jerome Rothenberg. In large numbers, these poets have not only translated his works, but written imitations, parodies, and pastiches—along with essays and critical reviews. Jonathan Mayhew’s Apocryphal Lorca is an exploration of the afterlife of this legendary Spanish writer in the poetic culture of the United States.

The book examines how Lorca in English translation has become a specifically American poet, adapted to American cultural and ideological desiderata—one that bears little resemblance to the original corpus, or even to Lorca’s Spanish legacy. As Mayhew assesses Lorca’s considerable influence on the American literary scene of the latter half of the twentieth century, he uncovers fundamental truths about contemporary poetry, the uses and abuses of translation, and Lorca himself.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jonathan Mayhew is professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas. He is the author of four books, most recently of The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry, 1980–2000.

REVIEWS

“The great merit of Mayhew’s study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent. For Mayhew, the American Lorca is largely an apocryphal figure, a cultural stereotype that was fully assimilated into the American idiom. Like all stereotypes, the Americanized Lorca is reductive: the poet's life is equated with his homosexuality and his murder by Franco's forces, and his oeuvre, whittled down to his essay ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’ and a small group of poems from Gypsy Balladbook and Poet in New York, becomes indistinguishable from a romantic image of Andalusian folk song and so-called Spanish surrealism.”

— Lawrence Venuti, Times Literary Supplement

“Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. . . . As an extended case study in the uses, abuses and consequences (intended and otherwise) of the practice of translation, the book is almost without precedent or parallel and will, if the world has any sense in it, serve as a practical model to other scholars. Secondly, this examination of the American afterlife of a prominent Spanish poet is also one of the most perceptive readings of 20th century American poetry that I have ever read.”

— Calque

“Apocryphal, American Lorca! Inviting us to consider how one culture reads another—how American poets read Spain through Lorca and Lorca through Spain—Jonathan Mayhew has given us an informative, thoughtful, fascinating, and often funny journey through translation, parody, and kitsch. No one could be better qualified to study Lorca’s work as ‘generative device’ in English-language poetry and get at the mystery of how and what a poet can mean in a different cultural context.”

— Christopher Maurer, Boston University

“An intriguing and invaluable study of import of Spanish deep image poetry in its domestic American mode, foregrounding problems of authenticity, translation, and imitation—and the legacy of the Duende.”

— Mary Ann Caws, CUNY Graduate Center

“Jonathan Mayhew’s Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca—in translation, of course—as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon—the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute.”

— Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets."

— Choice

“Jonathan Mayhew’s [Apocryphal Lorca] belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them.” –Hispanic Review

— Daniel Katz, Hispanic Review

“In this study, Jonathan Mayhew has taken as his point of departure the resonance of Lorca in the English-speaking world to carry out a fascinating exploration of the many Lorcas who exist in the poetic imagination of North America….Instead of interpreting Lorca’s poetry through his life (or death), Mayhew analyzes various examples of how his poetry inspires new textual readings (in poetic form or critical prose). Apocryphal Lorca…is much more thant a study of Lorca’s afterlives in American poetry between the 50s and 70s. It also offers an historical approach to the translation of the work, uncovering significant book reviews and discussing critical recognitions. The text is elegant and fresh; the analysis wide-ranging and historically specific…..[T]he original and erudite voyage that Mayhew creates through these American poets, through translation and their literary configuration, offers a captivating treatment of the lasting legacy of the Lorquian model based on ‘romantic genius and cultural essence.’”

— Revista de Literatura

Preface

Acknowledgments

Federico García Lorca (Himself) - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0001
[Federico García Lorca, literary culture, poetic genius, Andalusian culture, Ernest Hemingway]
This chapter sketches a portrait of Lorca as a charismatic, protean, and enigmatic authorial figure. It establishes an implicit point of comparison with the Americanized Lorca that dominates the rest of the book. It presents a Lorca that has a greater intellectual capacity and a more highly developed literary culture than the mythic stereotype allows for. Incomplete or misleading views of Lorca have their roots in romantic ideas of poetic genius, and in stereotypes of Andalusian culture left over from European constructions of romantic Spain, often filtered through the popular writings of Ernest Hemingway. (pages 1 - 21)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

The American Agenda - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0002
[Federico García Lorca, American poetry, national exceptionalism, cultural nationalism, cold war politics, Lorquismo, duende]
No study of Lorca's poetry on its own terms can explain why his poetry resonated so strongly in the United States. For an explanation of this resonance, this chapter turns to a set of purely domestic criteria that have little to do with Lorca as he might appear within his own cultural context. Lorca was particularly attractive to poets seeking to define a new variety of American cultural nationalism. He arrived on the scene as an alien figure, strongly identified with a quite different brand of national exceptionalism—that of Spain itself. Far from being an obstacle, however, Lorca's foreignness proved useful to those in search of a form of American cultural nationalism that might stand opposed to cold war politics. Lorca's poetry came to the fore with the poets associated with The New American Poetry, an anthology published in 1960. The contributions of African American and gay male poets are especially noteworthy during this period, but there is also a more generic Lorquismo, characterized by a tone of naive enthusiasm and by a proliferation of abusive citations of the duende. (pages 22 - 52)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Poet-Translators - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0003
[poet-translators, Federico García Lorca, American poets, Langston Hughes, Ben Belitt, Paul Blackburn, American Lorquismo]
Poet-translators have played a key role in the creation of the American Lorca. This chapter examines the strategies of domestication seen in a few paradigmatic cases. It begins with Langston Hughes's Gypsy Ballads, which he began to work on in Madrid during the Spanish civil war and published in 1951. The two translations that generated the most enthusiasm for Lorca in this decade were both published in 1955: The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, a compendium of translations by various hands, and Ben Belitt's The Poet in New York. Paul Blackburn's Lorca/Blackburn did not have the historical impact of these other translations, since it was published posthumously in 1979. Blackburn's translation, however, was produced during the pivotal period of American Lorquismo and throws into relief some key issues about the practice of translation at midcentury. (pages 53 - 77)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

The Deep Image - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0004
[deep image poetry, American poetry, Spanish surrealism, Federico García Lorca]
This chapter addresses the phenomenon of “deep image” poetry, a movement in midcentury U.S. poetics that reportedly owes a portion of its initial impetus to Lorca. It argues that the debt of deep image poetry to Lorca is less substantial than many critics have assumed. The founders of this movement drew inspiration from many sources aside from the “Spanish surrealism,” while Lorca himself has a minor role in the later development of this style. (pages 78 - 101)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Apocryphal Lorca - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0005
[American poets, Federico García Lorca, American poetry, Lorquian apocrypha, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, experimental translation]
In the years immediately prior to the emergence of deep image poetry, a few American poets put Lorca to more personal and idiosyncratic uses. Jack Spicer's 1957 After Lorca is not only the most extended and complex instance of Lorquian apocrypha in any language, but also a crucial work in his own development as a poet and, consequently, one of the most significant works of postwar American poetry. Before discussing Spicer's book, this chapter briefly examines a Robert Creeley poem of the same title, written five years earlier in 1952. Creeley's “After Lorca” does not have great significance within his own literary formation: it is quite different from Creeley's poetry of the early 1950s and did not lead him in new directions for his subsequent work. “After Lorca,” nonetheless, is noteworthy both as the first apocryphal Lorca poem written in English and as an intriguing instance of experimental translation. (pages 102 - 121)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Frank O̓hara's “Lorcaescas” - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0006
[Frank O'Hara, American poetry, American poets, duende, surrealism, Federico García Lorca, Lorquismo]
This chapter examines the poetry of Frank O'Hara, identifying points of convergence between him and Lorca. It suggests that O'Hara is a more “Lorquian” figure than either Robert Bly or James Wright. He belongs, in at least one or two facets of his work, to the tradition of bardic, charismatic twentieth-century figures like Mayakovsky, Lorca, and Ginsberg. This connection may be just as arbitrary as the conventional linking of Lorca to the deep image poets. The choice of interpretive frameworks is not natural or given, and literary traditions are always somewhat arbitrary, constructed after the fact in a selective process. At the very least, though, an exploration of O'Hara's Lorquismo has a heuristic value, showing that the divisions between rival schools of contemporary American poetry are not as clearcut as they might appear. (pages 122 - 142)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Kenneth Koch - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0007
[Kenneth Kock, Raymond Roussel, Federico García Lorca, French poetry, surrealist movement, Lorquismo]
Kenneth Koch is a poet strongly identified with French literature. His interest in Spanish poetry is limited to a single figure: Federico García Lorca. This one figure, nevertheless, shows up more often in his prose and verse than almost any single French poet, with the possible exception of Raymond Roussel. The chapter first to looks at Koch's actual view of French poetry, and in particular the surrealist movement, before turning to the question of his Lorquismo. (pages 143 - 159)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Jerome Rothenberg - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0008
[Jerome Rothenberg, American Lorquismo, Federico García Lorca, Lorquismo, ethnopoetics, deep image poetry, tribal poetry, avant-garde movements]
As the driving force behind the original deep image school, Jerome Rothenberg was an indispensable figure in American Lorquismo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but in subsequent decades Lorca makes only sporadic appearances in his work. As Rothenberg left the deep image behind him, he also stopped following developments in Spanish poetry after Lorca. Rothenberg's major accomplishment of the late 1960s and 1970s was to found the discipline of ethnopoetics, which can be defined as the study of archaic and tribal poetry and poetics with a sensibility informed by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Rothenberg's 1993 book The Lorca Variations represents a return to a major influence after a long hiatus. After translating the Suites for Christopher Maurer's authoritative 1991 edition of Lorca's collected poetry in English, Rothenberg went on to create a kind of Lorquian pastiche by recombining images taken from this book. (pages 160 - 174)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Conclusion - Jonathan Mayhew
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0009
[Federico García Lorca, Spanish literary history, American poets, American poetics]
This chapter argues that Lorca's poetic afterlife in the United States has its own context, as worthy of respect as the cultural and literary context of Lorca's Spain. Understandably, American poets did not attempt a scholarly reconstruction of the circumstances in which Lorca wrote, or delve deeply into Spanish literary history in order to arrive at a better understanding of his poetic tradition. The real strength of the American Lorca is its apocryphal character, its lack of respect for the original context, not its scrupulously accurate treatment of the original text. (pages 175 - 182)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Notes

Bibliography

Index