Gypsy Ballads

Subtract and see. The strongest poems leave little to take. Romance sonámbulo cannot lose its refrain, “Verde que te quiero verde”
(Green, how I want you green), because the refrain is the only thing in the poem that does not move; everything else, the wounded smuggler, the old man’s house, the drowned girl on the cistern, is a broken narrative the refrain holds. Romance de la luna, luna is all necessity: the moon comes to the forge, the child warns her, the gypsies come back to find him dead, and the poem stops. The order of the book argues too. What holds the axis: the three archangel poems are ornamental and could each lose a stanza without loss, and the deliberate gaps of the Don Pedro poem are partly a manner. A short book in which three or four of eighteen poems are slighter stops in the low eights.

Score: 8.4 / 10

What the book brings into the open is an outcast people held between eros and death and policed by a state that comes for them in the night, and an Andalusia whose Christian, Roman, Moorish and biblical layers are alive at once in the same streets. Romance de la Guardia Civil española is the plainest disclosure, and it holds as a statement: the guard with “el alma de charol”
(souls of patent leather) and skulls of lead, and the gypsy city burned. Antoñito’s arrest on the road to Seville discloses the same force more quietly. The charge is the rubric’s own: much of what the book discloses is a mood, the “pena” that Soledad Montoya carries and that Lorca named as the book’s single protagonist, and the gypsy is at moments a figure for that sorrow rather than a people seen. A sorrow rendered ranks below a condition stated and held.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Height and frequency are both high. Nearly every poem has its moment of terror or transport: the moon at the forge, “La luna vino a la fragua / con su polisón de nardos”
(The moon came to the forge / in her bustle of spikenard); the girl rocking on the face of the cistern, held up on the water by “un carámbano de luna”
(an icicle of moon); the black horses and black horseshoes of the civil guard; the “piquetas de los gallos”
(the cocks’ pickaxes) that dig for the dawn. The elevation is cold more often than warm, and the axis does not mind which. Held at 9.0 and not higher: the height is lyric and lives inside short poems, and in a few of them, the archangels, it is ornament rising rather than the poem rising.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The myth is built, not evoked, and that is the book’s distinction. Lorca made a mythology out of a real region. The moon is death, a woman who dances for a child and carries him off; the wind is a satyr chasing Preciosa; the civil guard are dark riders of an apocalypse; the archangels are civic patrons with a gypsy’s vanity. Antoñito el Camborio, “hijo y nieto de Camborios”
(son and grandson of Camborios), is arrested on a road and dies a passion near the Guadalquivir, a Christ figure who is also a dandy and a knife fighter. The three histories find the same pattern in a Roman martyr and an Old Testament rape, so that the myth claims time as well as place. Held below the top because the gypsy as figure is partly a literary type inherited from the costumbrista and Romantic gypsy, load-bearing in the best poems and decorative in some.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is the oldest form in Spanish poetry, the romance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the deep song of Andalusia; Lorca had organised the Concurso de Cante Jondo with Falla in 1922. The swerve is the fusion: the ballad’s octosyllable and narrative ellipsis carrying a metaphor of avant-garde concentration, the metaphor of the generation that revived Góngora in 1927, so that the oldest popular form takes the newest image. That had not been done at this pitch. The stake was real: the book risked, and suffered, being read as picturesque, and Dalí and Buñuel told him so. Held below the bar of the Epochal Gate because the path was proven and chosen: Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez had written modern romances before him, and Lorca’s riskier departure was the next book, Poeta en Nueva York, which this one is not.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The romance tells a story by leaving most of it out: it starts in the middle, gives speech without saying who speaks, and stops before the outcome is explained. That form is the book’s fatalism. In Romance sonámbulo the reader never learns why the smuggler is wounded or how the girl died, and the poem’s knowledge is exactly that not knowing: violence arrives in this world as an event without a cause one can be told. The single assonance carried through a poem is a second instrument, a sound that will not change while the story breaks. With the gaps filled, the book would be a description of Andalusia; as it stands, it is a world in which fate is the grammar. Held off the top because the form is inherited, and in the slighter poems it holds the image without adding knowledge.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The evidence is nearly a century of return. Romance sonámbulo has been read as a smuggler’s tragedy, a love poem, a death poem and a poem about poetry, and it is still argued over; the green of the refrain has been given a dozen readings and none has closed it. The book carries a large criticism in Spanish and in English, and its images are glossed and reglossed. Its relation to the Guardia Civil, and to Lorca’s murder, keeps it open to history as well as to reading. Held below the higher figures because a short lyric body, however dense, yields concentrated rather than wide, and part of the return is to three or four poems; the archangels and the Don Pedro are returned to mostly by specialists.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The field is Spanish poetry of the twentieth century, and through Lorca the poetry of the Spanish-speaking world. The force: the book showed that the popular and the avant-garde could be one poem, that the oldest Spanish form could carry modern metaphor without losing its people, and it set a register, moon, knife, horse, green, the night of the civil guard, that remade what the Spanish lyric could sound like. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: probably the most widely read book of Spanish poetry of its century, known by heart in Spain and Latin America, set to music again and again, and so imitated that “lorquismo” became the word for the imitations; through translation it made Lorca one of the most read poets of the century in any language. Held below the top of the eights because the reach was in large part a manner, and the deeper reorganisation of Spanish verse was shared with the whole generation of 1927.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Survival of ninety-eight years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as Lorca published it in 1928, with nothing lost or disputed, and nothing is charged. Presence: continuous since publication, in print through the decades in Spain and abroad, taught in schools across the Spanish-speaking world, translated widely and repeatedly, sung and recited. The early Franco years narrowed his presence in Spain for a time, but the book never left print or memory, and abroad his murder made him more read, not less. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a region and a folklore, but as material, not as a dated manner. Set at the top of the usual band for a span of seventy years to two centuries, and not at the figure kept for books of world reading on the scale of the great novels.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on the Spanish, on what can be shown without a native ear; the music of the octosyllable is weighed as far as this reading hears it. The command of the metre and the assonance is complete: the lines move with the speed of the old ballads and carry images of extreme compression without strain. The dialogue in two voices is placed and timed, as in the compadres’ bargain of Romance sonámbulo. The metaphors are exact rather than decorative in the best poems: the patent-leather souls, the cocks’ pickaxes. La casada infiel is a narrative given entirely in the voice of a boastful man, comic and sensual at once, and the voice never slips. Held below the very top because in the archangel poems the metaphor runs to filigree, and because the range of instruments is a ballad’s range.

Score: 9.2 / 10

One law governs the book: desire and death arrive together, under a moon, and the law, the state, the husband, the Church, the family, comes after them with a knife or a rifle. Take the most distant elements: the comic boast of La casada infiel and the Roman martyrdom of Santa Olalla, or the moon’s lullaby and the burning of the gypsy city. They obey that law, and the same horses, moons, knives and greens run through all of them. The archangels obey it too, as civic idols of the same Andalusia the guard destroys. The three histories are the test, and they pass it: Thamar y Amnón, the last poem, is the book’s eros and violence at their most extreme. Held below the top because the range, though wider than it looks, is one region, one register and one myth.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what an eighteen-poem lyric body holds, and not charged for its size. The sacred, in the archangels, the martyr and the Christ-like Antoñito; the state, in the civil guard; eros, in nearly every poem; death, everywhere; the family and its honour, in Thamar y Amnón and the Camborios; the natural order, made animate in moon, wind, river and horses; history, in the three historical romances, which reach from Rome through the Old Testament to Andalusia’s Christian and Moorish layers; and a people and its marginality. One myth integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the city as an economy, consciousness as an inner life and the family across time are absent or glimpsed, and every order is seen through a mythic lens that simplifies it.

Score: 7.6 / 10