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His friends in Granada were painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets.With de Falla he organized a festival of cante jondo, the ‘deep song’ of Southern Spain, and it was then that he came into closer contact with the gipsy world; its singers and dancers. J. B. Trend wrote that many ‘cultured’ people in Spain became at that time interested in the cante jondo ‘because they wished to acquire something of the oldest culture in the Peninsula’. No doubt Lorca was drawn to this society for the same reasons. While still in Granada, Lorca published his first prose book, Impresiones y paisajes (1918), the result of many trips around Spain with a group headed by his Professor of Art at the University of Granada. This series of narratives already shows the poet’s personality, and marks the end of his youthful period. In the following year he went to Madrid, ostensibly with the purpose of continuing his studies. There, as in Granada, his interests were again in the main non-academic. It was his good fortune, however, that he was advised for his studies to enter the Residencia de Estudiantes, an institution of great liberal tradition. The Residencia also sheltered many poets of note: Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, J. Moreno Villa, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén. In the President of the Residencia, Don Alberto Jiménez, he found a friend who was aware of Lorca’s worth and gave him every facility which would enable him to develop his personality. There he produced plays, composed at the piano,* painted (or drew with crayons), transcribed folk-songs, and recited his poems – a favourite occupation. In this congenial atmosphere he came also into contact with other Spanish intellectuals of note – Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset were often * He is not in fact known to have composed music while living at the Residencia: his only known piano compositions are from years earlier, and the arrangements of folksongs, done for La Argentinita, are later. [Ed.] 14
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to be found there – and several leading international writers who gave lectures at the Residencia, such as Bergson,Valéry, Claudel, Aragon, Chesterton, Keynes, H. G. Wells, etc. He stayed there for many years, never finishing his studies, but constantly working and perfecting his poetry, and fully conscious now of his calling as a poet. Futurism, Dadaism, and other revolutionary developments in the European post-war literary scenes were exerting their influence on several of Lorca’s contemporaries in Madrid; but he himself, by nature unsympathetic to cliques, seems at first to have been only remotely affected. In fact, it was not until his friendship with Salvador Dalí, the outstanding exponent of Surrealism, who lived in the Residencia for a time, that he showed any vital awareness of contemporary currents. But whether contemporary or traditional, any influence he received was quickly assimilated into his own poetical idiom, often unconsciously. A word or a phrase heard would one day appear in a poem, without his being aware of it. It was all part of his spontaneous approach to his art. Guillermo de Torre, speaking of Lorca’s assimilation and subsequent recreation of Andalusian folk-songs, says: ‘He sings them, he dreams them, he discovers them again – in a word, he turns them into poetry.’ In this same connexion, his brother Francisco says: ‘During an excursion to the Sierra Nevada, the mule driver who was leading sang to himself: Y yo que me la llevé al río creyendo que era mozuela, pero tenía marido.* Sometime later, one day when we were speaking of the ballad “The Faithless Wife”, I reminded Federico of the mule driver’s song. To my enormous surprise, he had completely * And I took her to the river believing her a maid, but she had a husband. 15

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His friends in Granada were painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets.With de Falla he organized a festival of cante jondo, the ‘deep song’ of Southern Spain, and it was then that he came into closer contact with the gipsy world; its singers and dancers. J. B. Trend wrote that many ‘cultured’ people in Spain became at that time interested in the cante jondo ‘because they wished to acquire something of the oldest culture in the Peninsula’. No doubt Lorca was drawn to this society for the same reasons.

While still in Granada, Lorca published his first prose book, Impresiones y paisajes (1918), the result of many trips around Spain with a group headed by his Professor of Art at the University of Granada. This series of narratives already shows the poet’s personality, and marks the end of his youthful period.

In the following year he went to Madrid, ostensibly with the purpose of continuing his studies. There, as in Granada, his interests were again in the main non-academic. It was his good fortune, however, that he was advised for his studies to enter the Residencia de Estudiantes, an institution of great liberal tradition. The Residencia also sheltered many poets of note: Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, J. Moreno Villa, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén. In the President of the Residencia, Don Alberto Jiménez, he found a friend who was aware of Lorca’s worth and gave him every facility which would enable him to develop his personality. There he produced plays, composed at the piano,* painted (or drew with crayons), transcribed folk-songs, and recited his poems – a favourite occupation. In this congenial atmosphere he came also into contact with other Spanish intellectuals of note – Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset were often

* He is not in fact known to have composed music while living at the Residencia: his only known piano compositions are from years earlier, and the arrangements of folksongs, done for La Argentinita, are later. [Ed.]

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