(Drawing by FGL, 1929)
For my money, the poem that follows - "La aurora" by the Spanish poet, dramaturge, and artist, Federico García Lorca - is the most harrowing depiction of the dark side of modernity. No one can match the succinct yet complex expressivity of the naturalistic and surrealistic imagery that marks this poem. In the end, which here is also the beginning, the "dawn," it is all constituitive of nothing, of nihilism - the futility, the annihilation of human drive and desire - and it is at least on par, if not above, the work of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Sartre, Camus, and so on.
"La aurora"
By Federico García Lorca
La aurora de Nueva York tiene
cuatro columnas de cieno
y un huracán de negras palomas
que chapotean en las aguas podridas.
La aurora de Nueva York gime
por las inmensas escaleras
buscando entre las aristas
nardos de angustia dibujada.
La aurora llega y nadie la recibe en su boca
porque allí no hay mañana ni esperanza posible.
A veces las monedas en enjambres furiosos
taladran y devoran abandonados niños.
Los primeros que salen comprenden con sus huesos
que no habrá paraísos ni amores deshojados;
saben que van al cieno de números y leyes,
a los juegos sin arte, a sudores sin fruto.
La luz es sepultada por cadenas y ruidos
en impúdico reto de ciencia sin raíces.
Por los barrios hay gentes que vacilan insomnes
como recién salidas de un naufragio de sangre.
From Poeta en Nueva York (written 1929-30, published posthumously 1940)
(English translation by STEPHEN SPENDER AND J. L. GILI)
The New York dawn has
four columns of mud
and a hurricane of black doves
that paddle in putrescent waters.
The New York dawn grieves
along the immense stairways,
seeking amidst the groins
spikenards of fine-drawn anguish.
The dawn comes and no one receives it in his mouth,
for there no morn or hope is possible.
Occasionally, coins in furious swarms
perforate and devour abandoned children.
The first to come out understand in their bones
that there will be no paradise nor amours stripped of leaves:
they know they are going to the mud of figures and laws,
to artless games, to fruitless sweat.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in impudent challenge of rootless science.
Through the suburbs sleepless people stagger,
as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood.
In addition... Some say that Leonard Cohen is the "master of erotic despair." But I believe that the title for the tilted crown of the jilted belongs to Lorca.
Exhibit A:
Of course, perhaps as all homages are destined to be, this one is quite bizarre. Still, the song has a peculiar charm and potency, nonetheless.
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