Poet in New York
Poets in New York is the title of a collection of poems by the Spanish author Federico García Lorca .
Historical background
Lorca wrote the work with the original title Poeta en Nueva York in the years 1929 and 1930. At that time he was on a trip to the USA to study at Columbia University in New York. Then Lorca traveled to Cuba, where he wrote more poems from the book of poetry. The trip was preceded by disagreements with his close friends Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel , which are discussed in the work. The stock market crash took place during Lorca's stay in the USA ; this event is also reflected in the work and reinforces the feeling of the poet's inner restlessness.
construction
The work Poets in New York consists of a total of 39 poems, which are summarized in ten groups:
- Poems from the Solitude of Columbia University : 4 Poems
- The blacks : 3 poems
- Streets and dreams : 9 poems
- Poems from Lake Eden Mills : 2 poems
- In the farmer's hut (area near Newburgh) : 3 poems
- Introduction to Death (Poems from the Solitude of Vermont) : 6 poems
- Return to the city : 3 poems
- Two odes : 2 poems
- Escape from New York (two waltzes towards civilization) : 2 poems
- Arrival of the poet in Havana : 1 poem
In the appendix of the work there are 4 more poems that were not assigned to any group.
analysis
Poet in New York represents a crossroads in the development of F. García Lorca. As a member of the generación del 27 , Lorca became through various influences of great poets and currents, from the Siglo de Oro ( Lope de Vega , Góngora , Quevedo ) to Bécquer and Rubén Darío to Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez , who had a clear reference to the present at the time. In the search for a stylistic renewal towards poesía pura ("pure poetry"), a style was established through metaphorical language, simple poetry that clearly stood out from modernism , and free verse. Lorca's work is characterized by surrealism , which - detached from any moral, social or artistic conventionalism - represents a radical renewal in literature. This is characterized by the loss of the rational and objective character and the development of a free expression in which a mixture of objects, motifs, concepts, emotions, feelings and spontaneous expressions can be presented in a subjective language. Feelings come before reflection and perception before understanding, so that a subjective, irrational language often forms that can have a metaphorically disturbing effect.
In Lorca's work, in particular, there is a profound existential anxiety and a sexual and moral frustration at that time. The result is the reflection of a fatalistic feeling and a fateful tragedy that run through the work to the end.
Poet in New York reflects the contrast between nature and civilization that Lorca uses to express his condemnation of dehumanization in modern society. His praise for nature and the clear evidence of racist and prejudiced grievances in society lay down the condemnation of the industrial era. All of this is done using symbolic language in which the noun is clearly dominant and replaces the adjective in its descriptive function , while this often triggers illogical associations in the form of fantastic images that are typical of surrealism, whereas the verb functions to represent dynamics. The metaphor in Lorca's work finds its meaning more in the emotional expression than in the ideological, so that one can say that the metamorphosis between reality and fantasy and the aspect of chaos assume a leading function and a dynamic prevails.
Poet in New York revolves around two opposing focuses, the city and the poet. The city itself provides the poet with the opportunity to express his emotional world and his worldview, his conception of life, nature and people, with a special focus on love, loneliness and death. Nevertheless, the center of the work is not the city itself, but this very expression of the author's feelings, the expression of anxiety and at the same time the desire for freedom, love and community.
expenditure
- Federico García Lorca: Poets in New York. Poems in Spanish and German. Transmission and afterword by Martin von Koppenfels. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-41167-5 .
literature
- Martin von Koppenfels: Introduction to Death. García Lorca's New York Poetry and the Sorrows of Modern Poetry. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1998, ISBN 3-8260-1545-2 (also: Berlin, Free University, dissertation 1997).
- Martin von Koppenfels: Introducción a la muerte. La poesía neoyorquina de Lorca y el duelo de la lírica moderna. Edition Reichenberger, Kassel 2007, ISBN 978-3-935004-79-4 (also: Berlin, Freie Universität, dissertation 1997).
- Imke Kreiser: Mutabor. Transsexual aesthetics in Federico García Lorca's "Poeta en Nueva York". Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-932602-58-7 .
- José Antonio Llera: Lorca en Nueva York. Una poética del grito. Edition Reichenberger, Kassel 2013, ISBN 978-3-944244-03-7 .
- Karen Genschow: Federico García Lorca. Life, work, effect. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-18251-2 .
