ASPECTS OF LORCA'S SAINT CHRISTOPHER

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Notes

¹Reference numbers refer to the pages of Federico Garcia Lorca, Obras completas, 4th ed. (Madrid 1960).

¹The rain, too, with its sinister monotony, forms the background for one of the best- known stories of Somerset Maugham; and in one of Hemingway's novels it creates a tiny thread of superstitious foreboding, reappearing in the final paragraph when this has been justified by death.

²Homer, The Iliad, tr. A. T. Murray (London 1925, reprinted 1947), XX, 224–25.

³P. Vergilius Maro, Georgicon, III, 272–79.

²Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 690–92, 700.

¹An inverted tulip, of course, like the open tulip of the hoop-skirt of the Virgen de la Soledad, or the ‘fanal de lluvia’ of Machado's Galerias.

¹Hans Memling, Dürer and Rubens portrayed him, and there is a fine fresco of the saint by Titian in the Ducal Palace at Venice.

²Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People (Cambridge 1951), 7; The Face of Spain (London 1950), 60, 71. The history of the church is full of such compromises. The dates of the great church feasts are almost all the dates of earlier pagan festivals. The secret cults of the ancient German forest are still commemorated in the Christmas tree. The devil and the witches of mediaeval faith were no more than vestiges of forbidden sects. And it is not hard to see in the bejewelled virgins of Holy Week in Andalusia a shadow of the Great Mother borne on the shoulders of her devotees in Phoenician Gadir o Malaca. History repeated itself in the New World when the Indians of Mexico and Peru adapted the adoration of the Virgin to their local cults.

¹Aurelio M. Espinosa, Spanish folklore in Standard Dictionary of Folklore (New York1949–50)-

²Manuel y Antonio Machado, Obras completas (Madrid 1957), 865-

³Whatever the verdict on Lorca's ‘culture’, there can be no doubt that he made excellentuse of what he knew. A cursory glance at Libro de poemas will show this. Indeed, one of hisgreatest gifts is his capacity for assimilating from all possible sources anything that is ofvalue for his own artistic creation.

¹The whole question of Lorca's use and creation of myth has been admirably treated by Gustavo Correa in his book La poesía mítica de Federico García Lorca (Eugene 1957). A case in point is the poet's treatment of the myth of Bacchus. He comments on it in his lecture on Góngora and uses it himself both in his poetry—the obvious example is the poem Baco from Canciones—and in his drama—the relationship of Yerma to the Bacchanals of Euripides is striking.

²Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 675–721. The story was recounted earlier in Plato's Phaedrus, 229

³Originally published by Marie Laffranque in BHi, LVI (1954), 314 et seq., Lorca's comments on the wind in folklore are reproduced in the Aguilar edition of Lorca's work, 1524 et seq. For the whole question of Lorca's use of popular material, see Daniel Devoto's brilliant preliminary study ‘El elemento tradicional en la obra de García Lorca’, Filología, II (1950), 292–341.

⁴E. García Gómez, Poemas arabigoandaluces (Austral), Nos. 76, 96. The influence of this Arabic poetry of Andalusia on Lorca is most apparent in his Diván del Tamarit.

¹Rafael Llopis Paret, Cuentos de terror (Madrid 1963); Arthur Machen, The Works of Arthur Machen (London 1923).

¹For modern uses of the theme, see E. M. Forster, The Story of a Panic and Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea. George Borrow in The Bible in Spain gives an account of a similar case he observed at Évora.