I found myself going to the music of duende, in other words, of which cante jondo is a supreme example, including the American duende of Billie Holiday and Cassandra Wilson, of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Bill Evans, of John Lee Hooker and Rambling Jack Elliot.Īmerican duende was especially important to me during those periods I spent living and working in Granada. To other forms of flamenco, for example, to medieval Arabic and Jewish music, and to American jazz. I found that in order to come to terms with these spare, peculiar poems, I had to come to terms with cante jondo, and especially the four palos or genres of Lorca's book: "Poem of the Gypsy Siguiriya," "Poem of the Soleá," "Poem of the Saeta," and "Description of the Petenera." Only by studying cante jondo, and translating lyrics of songs that moved me, and listening to cante jondo while I worked, did I begin to hear the strange, subtle rhythms and silences and accents of the poems.īut I found myself listening to other music, as well. Lorca was a minstrel, and he understood poetry as an oral expression.
It is enough to say that music itself became a constant companion. I won't indulge myself here by recalling all the reasons why I took on the project of translating Poema del Cante Jondo, or the obstacles I encountered along the way. Death sings and sings a song with her ancient white guitar. In "Description of the Petenera," Lorca dispenses with the narrative strategies of the songs, but the poems pay beautiful homage to the cry of their highly-charged metaphors.ĭeath travels down a road crowned with withered orange blossoms. The petenera, in fact, evolved from Sephardic-Jewish synagogue song, and the Jews perfected its form. It resembled the incantatory medieval singing of the Sephardic synagogue that I grew up in. And I was drawn to one particular book of his, Poema del Cante Jondo / Poem of the Deep Song, in part because I was drawn to the music it pays homage to, which also, strangely and surprisingly, was familiar to my ear. I can read the poetry of Federico García Lorca in the original.
So I understand Spanish, can speak it somewhat, and am still studying its nuances. I come from a household of three languages-Ladino, Hebrew, and English-one that I could understand but not speak, one that I could sing but not understand, and one that is the language of my country, at some distance, always, from my own home. For myself, the romance and Semitic languages, the languages of the Mediterranean and the Middle East are familiar to my ear, as opposed, let's say, to Slavic and Asian languages. I'm convinced that some languages, languages we neither speak nor understand, are familiar to the ear.
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