Federico Garcia Lorca was a twentieth-century Spanish poet whose most iconic ballads and deep songs combine the techniques of modern poetry with the linguistic characteristics of the Spanish folk ballad tradition. This is a review of Lorga, the Cursed Poet.

In August 1936, one morning in Granada, a Francoist bullet ended the life of Federico Garcia Lorca, the great modern poet, at the age of thirty-eight. This is the darkest hour of Spanish literature, but the executioners, Lorca's fellow countrymen, do not understand that no one can truly destroy Lorca, and no one can prevent him from gaining eternal life in his magnificent literary world.

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet of the 20th century and a representative of the "Generation of 2007". His most representative ballads and deep songs perfectly combine the skills of modern poetry and the linguistic characteristics of the traditional Spanish folk ballads, and have a great influence on the world of poetry. His main works include the poetry collection "Gypsy Ballads", "Songbook", "Poets in New York", and the drama "Blood Wedding".

In the long years that followed, however, "myths, fallacies, rumors, and gossip about Lorga," "' cliches' about the fickle nature of the poet," and "the metaphor of the colorful bird," unashamedly carved "that bust of Lorga - the genius of the poet, Master Andalucia."

Its purpose is to draw Lorga into the dust of the everyday world and to vulgarize access to its extraordinary literary richness.

Thirty-two years later, Francisco Umbral's Lorca, the Cursed Poet was published in Madrid. Franco was still alive, and so was censorship, so that the Complete Lorga could not be published in its true sense.

Forty-three years later, in the preface to a new edition of Lorga, the Cursed Poet, Ian Gibson praised the book, especially the courage with which it was written, and said that he had successfully accomplished his mission of breaking the false bust of Lorga.

Although Gibson saw the precision of Lorga's understanding in the book, he somewhat underestimated Umbral's ambition, dismissing it as a collection of essays or essays rather than a "book" as the author would have it.

This subtle disagreement stems from Gibson's failure to realize that the passages in the book, although ostensibly a discussion of Lorga's work and spiritual qualities, are in fact far beyond the scope of an essay/essay in terms of form, content, and inner relationships. What Umbral does in this book is to explore the literary world of Lorga again and again from different angles and paths through Lorga's work.

Gibson, of course, sees one of the greatest highlights of the book, which, based on an in-depth analysis of Lorga and Reuven Dario's "most striking commonality is the Apollonian and Dionysian conflict", reveals "the necessary conditions for being cursed: They are constantly at war with themselves, constantly in a state of division, and often need to hide their deepest selves, not only from the outside world, but even from themselves."

"The Cursed poet is the extreme case of rebellious art"

Passionate and sharp, Umbral aims to overturn many of the myths about Lorga's image in the past. For this reason, he bluntly defines Lorga as a "cursed poet" in the opening paragraph, and people will be shocked. Because "in Spanish literature, in Spanish poetry, there are no cursed poets." In particular, "the accumulation of information about Lorga's life and the various claims about him do not correspond to what has been known about the 'cursed poet' since the 19th century."

He frankly points out an embarrassing fact that is usually ignored in literary history: before the 19th century, European writers and artists "were always a decorative group of social irrelevance", and in the 19th century, when the social revolution and industrial Revolution broke out, this group was also on the edge of society and had no status at all.

A part of this group chooses obedience out of pragmatic necessity, in order to become the "chosen children" of "bourgeois society to pay their expenses"; Others are "determined not to serve a certain employer, but to make art that opposes society or supports its margins."

He argues that "opposition" and "fringe" give rise to two different lines. "Opposition" is a voice for the fringes of society and tends to anarchism; The "edge" belongs to the "cursed poet."

If the former represents "pure political piston centrifugal force," then the latter represents a centripetal force, "unlike anarchists, who do not destroy or seek to destroy society, they destroy themselves." Anarchism sees evil as a purification, while the cursed poet is evil for evil's sake - a mysticism either explicitly or implicitly conveyed by the cursed."

He then Outlines the creative nature of the "cursed poet" : "The cursed poet ends up as a displaced person, a person who has no clear social class to belong to, a person who suffers from a self-destructive complex and transforms this self-destructive tendency into his own work of art."

In his view, there is a complete failure to understand Lorga, especially the tragic secret that lies beneath his sociable facade, which makes him unable to integrate with society, and the failure to understand that "fundamentally Lorga was a man of resistance, I don't have any of the capricious Andalusian master who plays the piano and listens to the guitar."

He knows very well that the real Lorga is not in daily life, but can only be hidden in the depths of his works. So, faced with the only cursed poet in Spanish literature, the only example of the extremes of rebellious art, he had no choice: "I speak only of works, because works that are revelatory inevitably reveal the author and his life."