Federico Garcia Lorca and Melchor Fernandez Almagro met while attending discussions of “El Rinconcillo.” Associated with the Artists’ Center of Granada, the group was dedicated to breaking the pettiness of conventional forms. Melchor was especially close to García Lorca, and one of the few aware of his friend’s homosexuality. Still, the correspondence remains reticent in details, suggested here only in García Lorca’s intention to pose for a portrait by Salvador Dalí, his lover at the time.
To Melchor Fernandez Almagro
[Granada, late February, 1926]
Dear Melchorito:
I, who imagined, I don’t know why, that you were displeased with me, was overjoyed to see your letter from Zaragoza. I understand why the Aragonese city displeased you. Zaragoza is falsified and turned into a comic operetta, like the jota, and in order to find her ancient spirit you have to go to the Prado to admire the exact portrait done by Velasquez. There the Tower of San Pablo and the roofs of the Lonja are in their element against the pearly sky and the original silhouette of the houses. Today the city has departed. I, who have traveled throughout Aragon by train, believe that the old spirit of Zaragoza must be wandering around, riddled with white wounds, somewhere near Caspe, near the last gray rocks, where the hard wind flattens the shepherd and makes the light of the big stars shine savagely.
But Barcelona is very different, isn’t it? There one finds the Mediterranean, the spirit, the adventure, the elevated dream of perfect love. There are palms, people from every country, surprising advertisements, gothic towers and a rich urban high tide created by typewriters. How I enjoy being there, with that air and that passion! It doesn’t surprise me that they remember me, because I got along with them all and my poetry was given a better reception than it really deserved…Besides, I, who am a ferocious Catalanist, identified greatly with those people, so fed up with Catile and so creative.
I’ve kept up to date with that region through my friend and inseparable companion Salvador Dali, with whom I carry on an abundant correspondence. He has invited me to spend another season at his house, which I’ll certainly do, since I have to pose for him.
I have many secret projects that I’ll tell you about. I want to publish. Because if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it, and that’s bad. But I want to do it right. I’ve worked on the arrangement of my books. They are three. The things in them are things that should be there. The book I’ve done of brief songs is interesting. Since you don’t remember them, you think that they’ve been revised already. Nothing further from the truth. They’ve been left unscathed. Poor little things! But they have something, and that something is that which can’t be imitated. I am not carried away by music, like certain young poets. I grant love to the word (!) and not to the sound. My songs are not made of ash. How useful it has been to have put them away. Bless me! Now in this revision I’ve given them the final touch and it’s done! I dedicate one part of this book to Jorge Guillen’s daughter Terestita in this way: “To Teresita Guillen, playing her six-note piano.” All of them are dedicated to children. The other books are dedicated to adults. To you, to [Pedro] Salinas, etc. I’ve worked hard. I want to go to Madrid soon…, but I’ll go to Figueras and then to Toulouse with Paquito [Garcia Lorca]. The literary atmosphere of Madrid seems to me too stingy and mean. Everything turns into gossip, cabals, calumnies and American banditry. I feel like refreshing my poetry and my heart in foreign waters, in order to produce greater riches and expand my horizons. I’m sure that a new period is beginning now for me.
I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living with and dying by poetry. I’m beginning to see clearly. A high awareness of my future work is taking hold of me and an almost dramatic feeling of my responsibility constrains me… I don’t know… it seems that I’m giving birth to new forms and an almost dramatic feeling of my responsibility constrains me… I don’t know… it seems that I’m giving birth to new forms and an absolutely defined balance.
Paquito is still in Bordeaux. Soon he’ll go to Toulouse and then to London. I’m leaving immediately. I feel like giving you and Guillen a hug, you are both so good to me. I was born for my friends, but I was not born for mere acquaintances.
From Federico García Lorca: Selected Letters. Edited by David Gershator. New York: New Directions, 1983.
FURTHER READING
More details on the discussions of “El Rinconcillo.”
Recent biographical attempts to interpret the coded language of Lorca’s sexuality.