About
https://www.theliteraryreview.org/poetry-2/lament-for-the-death-of-ignacio-sanchez-mejias/
Poet, dramatist, artist, and musician Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) is considered the most important literary figure of twentieth-century Spain. He was born in the village of Fuente Vaqueros, just outside the city of Granada, in 1898 and was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. His poetry is read by millions and his plays are still performed on stages throughout the world.
Pablo Medina was born in Havana, Cuba. He is the co-translator, with Mark Statman, of García Lorca’s Poet in New York. He is also the author of the poetry collection The Man Who Wrote on Water and the novel Cubop City Blues, among other works. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.
Poem
Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías
Federico Garcia Lorca
Translated from Spanish by Pablo Medina
1. GORING AND DEATH
At five in the afternoon.
It was five sharp in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A basket of lime already set
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death and only death
at five in the afternoon.
The wind swept away the cotton
at five in the afternoon.
And rust planted crystal and nickel
at five in the afternoon.
Now the struggle of leopard and dove
at five in the afternoon.
And a thigh with a desolate horn
at five in the afternoon.
And so began the bass notes
at five in the afternoon.
The arsenic bells and the smoke
at five in the afternoon.
On the corners groups of silence
at five in the afternoon.
And the bull alone with heart on high
at five in the afternoon.
When the sweat of snow arrived
at five in the afternoon,
when the bullring filled with iodine
at five in the afternoon,
death laid eggs in the wound
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
At five sharp in the afternoon.
The bed is a coffin on wheels
at five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes blow in his ear
at five in the afternoon.
The bull bellowed on his brow
at five in the afternoon.
The room iridescent with agony
at five in the afternoon.
Gangrene comes in the distance
at five in the afternoon.
Trumpet of lilies on green groins
at five in the afternoon.
The wounds burned like suns
at five in the afternoon,
and the rabble broke the windows
at five in the afternoon.
Oh, what a terrible five in the afternoon!
It was five on all the clocks.
It was five in shadow of the afternoon.
2. SPILLED BLOOD
I don’t want to see it!
Tell the moon to come.
I don’t want to see
Ignacio’s blood on the sand.
I don’t want to see it!
The moon fully open,
a horse of quiet clouds
and the gray bullring of sleep
with willows over the barricades.
I don’t want to see it!
My memory burns.
Warn the jasmine
to cover its whiteness!
I don’t want to see it!
The cow of the old world
stroked a snout of blood
with its sorrowful tongue
and the bulls of Guisando
almost death and almost stone
bellowed like two centuries
tired of walking the land.
No.
I don’t want to see it.
Up the bleachers goes Ignacio
with death on his shoulders.
He looks for dawn
and it isn’t dawn.
He looks for his sensible profile
and sleep confuses him.
He looks for his beautiful body
and finds his open blood.
Don’t ask me to see it!
I don’t want to feel the spurt
growing weaker by the moment,
the spurt that illumines
the seats and spills
on the hide of the thirsty crowd.
Who orders me to look!
Don’t make me see it!
His eyes didn’t close
when he saw the horns approach,
but the terrible mothers
raised their heads
and all through the cattle ranches
there was an air of secret orders
thrown to celestial bulls
by the foremen of pale mists.
There wasn’t a prince in Seville
who could compare,
no sword like his sword
nor a heart so real.
His strength was a river of lions,
his prudence a torso of marble.
An air of Andalusian Rome
gilded his head
where his smile was a rose
of salt and intelligence.
The great fighter of bulls!
The good mountaineer of the mountain!
How soft with the wheat stalk!
How hard with his spurs!
How tender with the dew!
How dazzling in the fair!
How grand with the last
banderillas of dusk!
But now he sleeps forever.
Now the grass and the moss
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And his blood comes singing:
singing through marshes and prairies,
sliding down shivering horns,
wandering soulless in fog,
stumbling on thousands of hoofs
like a long, dark, sorrowful tongue
to form a puddle of agony
by the Guadalquivir of the stars.
Oh white wall of Spain!
Oh black bull of sorrow!
Oh hard blood of Ignacio!
Oh nightingale of his veins!
No.
I don’t want to see it!
There is no chalice to hold it.
There are no swallows that drink it,
no frost of light to cool it,
no song or deluge of lilies,
no crystal to bathe it in silver.
No.
I don’t want to see it!
3. THE LAID-OUT BODY
The stone is a forehead where dreams moan
without the curve of water or the frozen cypress.
The stone is a shoulder weighed down by time
with trees of tears and ribbons and planets.
I have seen gray rains race toward the waves
raising their tender bullet-ridden arms
not to be hunted by the horizontal stone
that tears out limbs without soaking up blood.
Because the stone gathers semen and clouds,
skeletons of larks and shadow wolves,
yet gives no sound or crystal or fire,
only bullrings and bullrings and other bullrings without walls.
Ignacio the well-born already lies on the stone.
It is over; what’s the matter? Look at his figure:
death has covered him with a pale sulfur
and given him the head of a dark minotaur.
It is over. Rain enters his mouth.
The mad wind leaves his sunken chest
and Love, soaked with tears of snow,
suns itself on the hills of the cattle ranches.
What is it they say? A stench-filled silence rests.
We stand before a laid-out body that vanishes,
with a clear form that held the nightingales,
and we see it fill with bottomless holes.
Who wrinkles the shroud? It is not true what they say!
No one is singing here, or weeps in the corner,
or uses his spurs or frightens the snake:
all I want here are wide open eyes
to see that body that can never rest.
Here I want to see men of powerful voices.
The breakers of stallions, masters of rivers,
the men whose skeletons rattle
and sing mouthfuls of sun and flint.
I want to see them here. Before the stone.
Before this body with the broken reins.
I want them to show me the way out
for this captain tied to death.
I want them to teach me to weep
like a river of sweet mists and deep shores,
to carry the body of Ignacio, to free him
from the double snorting of the bull.
To lose him in the round bullring of the moon
that feigns like a girl the sorrow of a quiet cow;
to lose him in the night where no fish sing
and in the white thicket of a frozen smoke.
I don’t want them to cover his face with handkerchiefs.
Let him live with the death he bears.
Go, Ignacio, don’t feel the hot bellowing.
Sleep, fly, rest. The sea, too, dies.
4. ABSENT SOUL
Neither bull nor fig tree knows you,
not the horses or the ants of your house,
not your mute memory
because you have died forever.
The stone’s loin doesn’t know you
or the black satin where you shatter.
Your mute memory doesn’t know you
because you have died forever.
Autumn will come with its seashells,
its misty grapes, its gathering of hills,
but no one will want to look in your eyes
because you have died forever.
Because you have died forever
like all the dead of the earth,
like all the dead who are forgotten
under a mound of darkened dogs.
No one knows you. No. But I sing to you.
I sing for the future your profile and your grace.
The ripe gleam of your wisdom.
Your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.
The sadness borne in your valiant joy.
It will take a long time, if at all,
for an Andaluz to be born so clear,
so rich with adventure.
I sing his elegance with a whimper of words
and remember a sad breeze among the olive trees.