Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/p><\/div>\nFor a son of the titular city, reading Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca\u2019s Poet in New York <\/em>is akin to curling into your lover, your nose dipped in the well of their collarbone, as they detail your mother\u2019s various personality disorders. Yes, Federico, yes, my mother is thoroughly racist and takes every opportunity to remind me, her sometimes destitute child, about the silent cruelty of money. \u201cAt least you got to leave,\u201d I want to tell him. \u201cImagine being stuck with her for the rest of your life.\u201d He would likely understand my irrational attachment; after all, he was so consumed by Spain, its art and its politics, that his country would go on to swallow him whole.<\/p>\nStill, it is crucial for those of us with this sort of umbilical tether to unwind it and test how far it might stretch. In June 1929, following a voyage on the sister liner of the Titanic<\/em>, Lorca arrived from Spain by way of Southampton, England, to New York, a city he would immediately call a \u201cmaddening Babel.\u201d The poet was thirty-one, nursing his wounds from a breakup with a handsome sculptor, Emilio Perojo, whom Lorca maintained used him to gain access to the art world. Lorca had also become estranged from a pair of his Spanish friends and contemporaries, Salvador Dal\u00ed and Luis Bu\u00f1uel, and felt hemmed in by the success of his most recent work, Gypsy Ballads<\/em>. He wrote, \u201cThis \u2018gypsy\u2019 business gives me an uneducated, uncultured tone \u2026 I feel they are trying to chain me down.\u201d With the help of his parents and at the urging of Fernando de los R\u00edos, a law professor and friend of the family, Lorca enrolled in a summer program at Columbia University. For the better part of a year, in room 617 of Furnald Hall, and then in room 1231 of John Jay Hall, he would write Poet in New York<\/em>. The language is hallucinatory and toxic, peyote laced with sulfur: pigeon skulls lie in corners; cats choke down frogs; blond blood flows on rooftops everywhere; tongues lick clean the wounds of millionaires. V. S. Pritchett wrote about the book: \u201cWhat we call civilization, [Lorca] called slime and wire.\u201d<\/p>\nI visited Furnald Hall on a Thursday in January. It was around 3 P.M.<\/small> The sky, vacuumed of its gauze, had begun to pale. I went as a guest of a friend who teaches at the university, and both of us promised security I\u2019d leave quickly. Perhaps it was because I was rereading the section in Poet <\/em>called \u201cPoems of Solitude in Columbia University\u201d or because it was shortly before registration for the winter semester, but every sound in the hallways was harsh and detached\u2014hoarse conversations behind half-closed doors, the thin complaint of de-icing salt underfoot. Room 617 was locked, but 618 was being moved into. With the student\u2019s permission, I examined the room and looked out the south-facing window onto campus. The student asked me what or whom I was searching for. I couldn\u2019t say. I couldn\u2019t rewild the sycamore skeletons that were now clinging to the day\u2019s last light; I couldn\u2019t properly conjure the summer of 1929; but I did wonder if it was from this vantage that Lorca dwelled on his former lover, the supposed careerist.<\/p>\n\nWhat I gave you, Apollonian man, was a standard of love,
\nbursts of tears with an estranged nightingale.
\nBut you were food for ruin and whittled yourself to nothing
\nfor the sake of fleeting, aimless dreams.<\/p>\n
\u2014\u201cYour Childhood in Menton,\u201d translated from the Spanish by Greg Simon and Steven F. White<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I made my way to Cotton Club, one of the many jazz clubs Lorca frequented and a large part of why he fell in love with Harlem and Black culture. Unfortunately, the bouncer told me there wasn\u2019t a show that night\u2014maybe I could come back for Brunch and Gospel on Sunday. \u201cNot as much jazz as there used to be,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of covers.\u201d<\/p>\n
I followed Lorca\u2019s contrails south and found that his New York had been demolished and substituted. Near Battery Place, where there was, during his time, an aquarium, there is only a fish-themed carousel. Where he wrote about \u201cshadowy people who stumble on street corners,\u201d I found parents entertaining stock-still children and a young couple chin-deep in a mushroom trip. I obliged the couple when they asked for a cigarette and then walked north to Battery Park City, entering Brookfield Place, a mall with a subway-station appendix. Omega, Bottega Veneta, Fendi, an Equinox. The atrium\u2019s centerpiece was an LED installation entitled Luminaries<\/em>, which, their website claims, through \u201cthe individual and collective act of wishing creates a communal and celebratory tradition.\u201d Visitors are prompted to place their hands atop one of three squat white columns in the middle of the room and make their wish. A moment later, upon removing their hands from these \u201cwishing stations,\u201d a constellation of plastic cubes overhead light up in a display of pastel phosphorescence. A boy in a Patagonia vest indulged his curiosity, placing his hand on one of the columns.\u201d Above him, a grid of cubes lit up\u2014wish granted.<\/p>\n\nWe will have to journey through the eyes of idiots,
\nopen country where the tame cobras hiss in a daze,
\nlandscapes full of graves that yield the freshest apples,
\nso that overwhelming light will arrive to frighten the rich behind their magnifying glasses\u2014<\/p>\n
\u2014\u201cLandscape of a Pissing Multitude (Battery Place Nocturne),\u201d translated from the Spanish by Greg Simon and Steven F. White<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The kid and his father started laughing. The overwhelming light wasn\u2019t all that frightening, apparently. In the far corner, a custodian rode an escalator up and down, dragging his mop across the escalator\u2019s steel divider, cleaning something that is almost never dirty. The capitalist economic system, according to Lorca, was one \u201cwhose neck must be cut.\u201d Sure thing, my man. I\u2019m on it. Exiting the mall, I heard the drone of a helicopter; it was affixed to the sky as if by flypaper, loudly headed nowhere.<\/p>\n
Lorca said he was \u201clucky enough\u201d to witness the Wall Street crash. One could say he didn\u2019t like bankers and was angry even at their suicides. \u201cRivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit.\u201d And on this Wall Street, where Lorca situated his poem \u201cDance of Death\u201d\u2014a true death from which there is no resurrection\u2014I found a team of exultant rats tearing into a Sweetgreen bag. Life had officially been affirmed! There was something doleful about the whole scene, of course, but the rats had a winter to endure.<\/p>\n
\nThis place isn\u2019t foreign to the dance, I say it.
\nThe mask will dance between columns of blood and numbers,
\nbetween hurricanes of gold and moans of idled workers,
\nwho will howl, dark night, for your time without lights.<\/p>\n
\u2014\u201cDance of Death,\u201d translated from the Spanish by Pablo Medina<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The Brooklyn Bridge is the subject of one of Lorca\u2019s nocturnes, \u201cCity without Sleep,\u201d in which, as the title implies, no one sleeps. On my travels at around midnight, the bridge was deserted, windswept, and intolerable. Lorca, a vain sartorialist of sorts, must have walked this walk in the summer, likely donning a linen suit. Fatigued by the initial incline, I stopped and checked my phone. A friend who knew about my strange project had sent me a photo of Lorca\u2019s memorial in Granada. Six years after Lorca returned to Spain from New York, he was executed. Though the exact circumstances surrounding his execution remain unknown, it was a civil war, the nationalists wanted a return to the monarchy, and he was a gay socialist; these things tend to happen. Lorca mentions assassination nine times in the collection. In one case, he writes: \u201cI knew they had murdered me.\u201d Poet in New York<\/em> would be published posthumously, and his remains have yet to be found.<\/p>\n\nI\u2019ve already said it.
\nNo one sleeps.
\nBut if at night someone has an excess of moss on his temples,
\nthen open the trap doors so the moon lets him see
\nthe false cups, the poison, and the skull of the theaters.<\/p>\n
\u2014\u201cCity Without Sleep (Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge),\u201d translated from the Spanish by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Upon returning to Granada, Lorca said, \u201cNew York is something awful, something monstrous \u2026 Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.\u201d If what he found in my city was \u201cthe world\u2019s great lie,\u201d he embodied that fabrication. During his time in New York, in his letters to friends and family Lorca is delirious and congenial, taking a tone at odds with that of his work. He beautifully exaggerates his willingness to learn English, he compliments the several friends and academics who go to great lengths to take care of him, he makes repeated mention of the beautiful girls he\u2019s meeting (eliding his sexuality, maybe; I can\u2019t tell), and when he\u2019s asked to return home for a wedding, he writes that it would be best for him to stay just a while longer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Zain<\/span> Khalid<\/span> is a writer from New York.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI went as a guest of a friend who teaches at the university, and both of us promised security I\u2019d leave quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2463,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68637],"tags":[67827,7510],"class_list":["post-167148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writers-houses-2","tag-featured","tag-federico-garcia-lorca"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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![Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/p><\/div>\nFor a son of the titular city, reading Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca\u2019s Poet in New York <\/em>is akin to curling into your lover, your nose dipped in the well of their collarbone, as they detail your mother\u2019s various personality disorders. Yes, Federico, yes, my mother is thoroughly racist and takes every opportunity to remind me, her sometimes destitute child, about the silent cruelty of money. \u201cAt least you got to leave,\u201d I want to tell him. \u201cImagine being stuck with her for the rest of your life.\u201d He would likely understand my irrational attachment; after all, he was so consumed by Spain, its art and its politics, that his country would go on to swallow him whole.<\/p>\nStill, it is crucial for those of us with this sort of umbilical tether to unwind it and test how far it might stretch. In June 1929, following a voyage on the sister liner of the Titanic<\/em>, Lorca arrived from Spain by way of Southampton, England, to New York, a city he would immediately call a \u201cmaddening Babel.\u201d The poet was thirty-one, nursing his wounds from a breakup with a handsome sculptor, Emilio Perojo, whom Lorca maintained used him to gain access to the art world. Lorca had also become estranged from a pair of his Spanish friends and contemporaries, Salvador Dal\u00ed and Luis Bu\u00f1uel, and felt hemmed in by the success of his most recent work, Gypsy Ballads<\/em>. He wrote, \u201cThis \u2018gypsy\u2019 business gives me an uneducated, uncultured tone \u2026 I feel they are trying to chain me down.\u201d With the help of his parents and at the urging of Fernando de los R\u00edos, a law professor and friend of the family, Lorca enrolled in a summer program at Columbia University. For the better part of a year, in room 617 of Furnald Hall, and then in room 1231 of John Jay Hall, he would write Poet in New York<\/em>. The language is hallucinatory and toxic, peyote laced with sulfur: pigeon skulls lie in corners; cats choke down frogs; blond blood flows on rooftops everywhere; tongues lick clean the wounds of millionaires. V. S. Pritchett wrote about the book: \u201cWhat we call civilization, [Lorca] called slime and wire.\u201d<\/p>\nI visited Furnald Hall on a Thursday in January. It was around 3 P.M.<\/small> The sky, vacuumed of its gauze, had begun to pale. I went as a guest of a friend who teaches at the university, and both of us promised security I\u2019d leave quickly. Perhaps it was because I was rereading the section in Poet <\/em>called \u201cPoems of Solitude in Columbia University\u201d or because it was shortly before registration for the winter semester, but every sound in the hallways was harsh and detached\u2014hoarse conversations behind half-closed doors, the thin complaint of de-icing salt underfoot. Room 617 was locked, but 618 was being moved into. With the student\u2019s permission, I examined the room and looked out the south-facing window onto campus. The student asked me what or whom I was searching for. I couldn\u2019t say. I couldn\u2019t rewild the sycamore skeletons that were now clinging to the day\u2019s last light; I couldn\u2019t properly conjure the summer of 1929; but I did wonder if it was from this vantage that Lorca dwelled on his former lover, the supposed careerist.<\/p>\n\nWhat I gave you, Apollonian man, was a standard of love,\nbursts of tears with an estranged nightingale.\nBut you were food for ruin and whittled yourself to nothing\nfor the sake of fleeting, aimless dreams.<\/p>\n\u2014\u201cYour Childhood in Menton,\u201d translated from the Spanish by Greg Simon and Steven F. White<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nI made my way to Cotton Club, one of the many jazz clubs Lorca frequented and a large part of why he fell in love with Harlem and Black culture. Unfortunately, the bouncer told me there wasn\u2019t a show that night\u2014maybe I could come back for Brunch and Gospel on Sunday. \u201cNot as much jazz as there used to be,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of covers.\u201d<\/p>\nI followed Lorca\u2019s contrails south and found that his New York had been demolished and substituted. Near Battery Place, where there was, during his time, an aquarium, there is only a fish-themed carousel. Where he wrote about \u201cshadowy people who stumble on street corners,\u201d I found parents entertaining stock-still children and a young couple chin-deep in a mushroom trip. I obliged the couple when they asked for a cigarette and then walked north to Battery Park City, entering Brookfield Place, a mall with a subway-station appendix. Omega, Bottega Veneta, Fendi, an Equinox. The atrium\u2019s centerpiece was an LED installation entitled Luminaries<\/em>, which, their website claims, through \u201cthe individual and collective act of wishing creates a communal and celebratory tradition.\u201d Visitors are prompted to place their hands atop one of three squat white columns in the middle of the room and make their wish. A moment later, upon removing their hands from these \u201cwishing stations,\u201d a constellation of plastic cubes overhead light up in a display of pastel phosphorescence. A boy in a Patagonia vest indulged his curiosity, placing his hand on one of the columns.\u201d Above him, a grid of cubes lit up\u2014wish granted.<\/p>\n\nWe will have to journey through the eyes of idiots,\nopen country where the tame cobras hiss in a daze,\nlandscapes full of graves that yield the freshest apples,\nso that overwhelming light will arrive to frighten the rich behind their magnifying glasses\u2014<\/p>\n\u2014\u201cLandscape of a Pissing Multitude (Battery Place Nocturne),\u201d translated from the Spanish by Greg Simon and Steven F. White<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe kid and his father started laughing. The overwhelming light wasn\u2019t all that frightening, apparently. In the far corner, a custodian rode an escalator up and down, dragging his mop across the escalator\u2019s steel divider, cleaning something that is almost never dirty. The capitalist economic system, according to Lorca, was one \u201cwhose neck must be cut.\u201d Sure thing, my man. I\u2019m on it. Exiting the mall, I heard the drone of a helicopter; it was affixed to the sky as if by flypaper, loudly headed nowhere.<\/p>\nLorca said he was \u201clucky enough\u201d to witness the Wall Street crash. One could say he didn\u2019t like bankers and was angry even at their suicides. \u201cRivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit.\u201d And on this Wall Street, where Lorca situated his poem \u201cDance of Death\u201d\u2014a true death from which there is no resurrection\u2014I found a team of exultant rats tearing into a Sweetgreen bag. Life had officially been affirmed! There was something doleful about the whole scene, of course, but the rats had a winter to endure.<\/p>\n\nThis place isn\u2019t foreign to the dance, I say it.\nThe mask will dance between columns of blood and numbers,\nbetween hurricanes of gold and moans of idled workers,\nwho will howl, dark night, for your time without lights.<\/p>\n\u2014\u201cDance of Death,\u201d translated from the Spanish by Pablo Medina<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe Brooklyn Bridge is the subject of one of Lorca\u2019s nocturnes, \u201cCity without Sleep,\u201d in which, as the title implies, no one sleeps. On my travels at around midnight, the bridge was deserted, windswept, and intolerable. Lorca, a vain sartorialist of sorts, must have walked this walk in the summer, likely donning a linen suit. Fatigued by the initial incline, I stopped and checked my phone. A friend who knew about my strange project had sent me a photo of Lorca\u2019s memorial in Granada. Six years after Lorca returned to Spain from New York, he was executed. Though the exact circumstances surrounding his execution remain unknown, it was a civil war, the nationalists wanted a return to the monarchy, and he was a gay socialist; these things tend to happen. Lorca mentions assassination nine times in the collection. In one case, he writes: \u201cI knew they had murdered me.\u201d Poet in New York<\/em> would be published posthumously, and his remains have yet to be found.<\/p>\n\nI\u2019ve already said it.\nNo one sleeps.\nBut if at night someone has an excess of moss on his temples,\nthen open the trap doors so the moon lets him see\nthe false cups, the poison, and the skull of the theaters.<\/p>\n\u2014\u201cCity Without Sleep (Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge),\u201d translated from the Spanish by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nUpon returning to Granada, Lorca said, \u201cNew York is something awful, something monstrous \u2026 Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.\u201d If what he found in my city was \u201cthe world\u2019s great lie,\u201d he embodied that fabrication. During his time in New York, in his letters to friends and family Lorca is delirious and congenial, taking a tone at odds with that of his work. He beautifully exaggerates his willingness to learn English, he compliments the several friends and academics who go to great lengths to take care of him, he makes repeated mention of the beautiful girls he\u2019s meeting (eliding his sexuality, maybe; I can\u2019t tell), and when he\u2019s asked to return home for a wedding, he writes that it would be best for him to stay just a while longer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nZain<\/span> Khalid<\/span> is a writer from New York.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI went as a guest of a friend who teaches at the university, and both of us promised security I\u2019d leave 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