laht - A Boston University professor has discovered by chance at the Library of Congress in Washington the first draft, written and corrected by hand, of the Federico Garcia Lorca poem “Oficina y Denuncia” (Office and Denunciation), included in his famed “Poet in New York” collection.
The manuscript is a true “rarity,” not only because it was believed lost, but also because it contains corrections in pencil by the Spanish poet and dramatist (1898-1936), Christopher Maurer told Efe.
In the rough draft are verses that do not appear in the final edition of the collection, written between 1929 and 1930 during Garcia Lorca’s stay in New York and a later trip to Cuba.
“I offer myself to be devoured by Spanish peasants,” declaims Garcia Lorca in the handwritten poem that speaks of the arrogance and haughtiness of a city, New York, consumed by its lust to put a price and value on everything.
That line eventually disappeared from the verse which in translation signifies: “I offer myself to be eaten/ by the crowded cows/ when their bellowing fills the valley/ where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.”
“I was astonished by the richness of the variations,” Prof. Maurer told Efe in a telephone conversation from his office at Boston University, though he acknowledged that the corrections the poet made were well done.
“A good poem always creates that feeling of inevitability,” the sense that the best verse is the one we’re accustomed to reading, the Hispanist said.
Nonetheless, what remains very revealing was Lorca’s intention to include in his poem the idea of being “devoured,” which supports the poet’s messianic idea “that he be seen as a Savior, as a Messiah.”
“Though we must separate the biographical terrain from the literary, in Lorca’s case they often blend together – people have sought to read Lorca’s life in his poems. But the truth is that in “Poet in New York,” Lorca creates a leading character, an alter ego, who at times has little to do with the poet of flesh and blood,” the professor said.
The discovery of this autographic work was completely by chance, since the first reference that the professor had of it was in an Internet search he was making for his next book, which will relate the story of Lorca’s stay in New York.
In his search he saw that the U.S. Library of Congress curiously listed the name of Garcia Lorca in a music catalogue. When he went to the American capital to check it out, he discovered that it was one of six autographic poems from “Poet in New York” that had disappeared.
Maurer spent “months” trying to reconstruct how the poem ended up there, since it was thought to have been in the possession of the family of Canary Islands poet Jose Maria Millres Sall, though his daughter said that “she had no idea that her father ever had it in his life.”
The truth is that the manuscript was given to the Library of Congress by musicologist Hans Moldenhauer, who bought it at auction in New York for $230. The Library of Congress listed it in its catalogue for the first time in 2005.
This is not the first time that Maurer has discovered a Lorca manuscript, given that the book he is preparing together with Andrew Anderson on Lorca’s journey to New York contains a number of unpublished documents.
“We have found other manuscripts, letters related to his time in New York, some of which were unknown. There are notes of his written by hand. We know that Lorca left some manuscripts in New York, and that his friends preserved some of his things. This has cost us a lot of work,” the Hispanist said.
The trip to New York had a tremendous impact on Lorca, who was executed by Francoist forces in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.
“It transformed his work, because there for the first time he came in contact with crowds of people. Before going to New York he had no idea what an urban crowd was, a society with a multiplicity of religions and races. It gave him a new vision of modernity. Neither in Granada nor in Madrid had he seen such a mixture before,” he said.
The book on the subject of “Federico in New York and Cuba: Letters and Recollections,” will probably be presented this summer in Granada to coincide with the inauguration of the Lorca Center in that city.
Autograph Article 
