August 19th

Painting by Emily Tarleton

It was on this day in 1936 that the 38-year-old Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was executed, a few weeks after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In those first weeks, people on both sides — the leftist republicans and the right-wing nationalists — were rounded up and killed, as many as 50,000, with particularly heavy casualties against the republicans.

Lorca was a leftist sympathizer, an open homosexual, and a writer who wrote about oppressed people like gypsies, so he was an easy target for the nationalists.

Posted over on The Writer's Almanac


Painting by Nikolai Yaroshenko

The Gypsy and the Wind

Playing her parchment moon
Precosia comes
along a watery path of laurels and crystals.
The starless silence, fleeing
from her rhythmic tambourine,
falls where the sea pounds and sings,
its night filled with silvery swarms.
High atop the mountain peaks
the sentinels are sleeping;
they guard the white towers
of the English consulate.
And the gypsies of the water
for their pleasure erect
little castles of conch shells
and twigs of green pine.

*
Playing her parchment moon
Precosia comes.
The wind sees her and rises,
the wind that never slumbers.
Naked Saint Christopher swells,
watching the girl, as he plays
with tongues of celestial bells
on an invisible bagpipe.

Child, let me lift your skirt
and have a look at you.
Open in my ancient fingers
the blue rose of your belly.

Precosia throws the tambourine
and runs away in terror.
The virile wind pursues her
with his hot sword.

The sea darkens and roars,
while the olive trees turn pale.
The flutes of darkness sound
and a muted gong of the snow.

Precosia, run, Precosia
Or the green wind will catch you!
Precosia, run, Precosia!
And look how fast he comes!
A satyr of low-born stars
with his long and glistening tongues.

*
Precosia, filled with fear,
now makes her way to that house
beyond the tall green pines
where the English consul lives.

Alarmed by the anguished cries,
three riflemen come running,
their black capes tightly drawn,
and berets down over their brow.

The Englishman gives the gypsy
a glass of tepid milk
and a shot of Dutch gin
which Precosia does not drink.

And while she tells them, weeping,
of her strange adventure,
the wind furiously bites
at the slate roof tiles.

F. Garcia Lorca