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Short storyRasheed El‐Enany a

a Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies ,University of Exeter ,Published online: 15 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Rasheed El‐Enany (1989) Short story, Third World Quarterly,11:4, 252-264, DOI: 10.1080/01436598908420204

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RASHEED EL-ENANY

Poets and rebels: reflections of Lorca in modernArabic poetry

Garcia Lorca *by Badr Shākir al-Sayyab

In his heart is a stoveWhose fire feeds the hungry.From its hell gushes forth water:A flood purging the earth of evil.Of flame his eyes weave a sail,Whose threads they gather from the spindles of rain,From eyes which emit fire,From the breasts of mothers at the suckling hour,From knives whence trickle the sweetness of fruit,From midwives' knives which cut umbilical cords,And from conquerors' knives chewing light.His sail, moist like the moon;Strong like a stone;Swift like the twinkle of an eye.Green like spring—His sail, red with a dye of bloodIs like the sail of a child's boat,Made from the pages of a book which he tore apart,Filling, from its contents, the river with boats.It is like Columbus' sail at sea,Like Fate.

Lorca tby Mahmūd DarwTsh

Forgive me, O flowers of bloodThat I dare address myself to you.A sun, O Lorca, is in your hands,And a cross clad in the fire of a poem.They make nocturnal pilgrimage to you,The most beautiful knights,With martyred men and martyred women.

Such is the poet: an earthquake, a torrent of rain,A hurricane. When he rumblesThe roads whisper to each other:

* From 'Unshūdat al-Matar (The Rain Song, 1960).† From Awrāq Zaytūn (Olive Leaves, 1964).

2 5 2 TWQ 10(4) October 1989/ISSN 0143-6597/89. $1.25

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'His footsteps will pass this way,Disperse, O stones!'

Such is the poet: music; a chanted prayer;A breeze when he whispers.He takes a beautiful girl with the gentleness of a god.And to him the moons are a nest when he rests.

Spain is still the most wretched of mothers;She let down her hair on her shouldersAnd on the olive branches of a dark eveningShe hung her swords.

At night the guitar player roams the roadsSinging in secret.With your poems, O Lorca, he gathers charitiesFrom the eyes of the poor.

The black eyes in Spain stare hard,And mute is the speech of love.A grave will the poet dig in his handsIf he utters a word.

Forgetfulness has forgot to erase your radiant bloodAnd thus in blood were covered the smiles of the moon.The noblest of swords is a song of your composition;A song about the gypsies.

The latest news from Madrid:'The patient are sated with patience,'Says the Wound. 'Julian was shot at night,But the orange blossoms still diffuse their scent.'

The best news from MadridWill come tomorrow.

Lorca *by Salāh 'Abd al-Sabur

Lorca is a fountain in a square;A shady place for children at noon to repose;A gypsy song;A golden sun;A summer night blessed;A woman bearing twins;A white lilyRubbing its cheeks in the water;Tower bells

* From Ahlām al-Fāris al Qadūm (Dreams of the Ancient Knight, 1964).

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In the belly of a fogNear the solitary star;Sometimes they sing and sometimes they sigh;The leaves of Palm-Sunday;Sugar candy;A heart filled with limpid light;Transparent ribs;A naked chest of foam and smoke;A banner for the brave.Lorca is sweet like the harvest of sated bees;Bitter like the sweet waters of the sea;And thirsty like its waves.

On a still summer nightThe poet became a legend.The petty guards killed him.The petty guards killed him.He lay in a heap; a wound above the hill.A decayed skull chokedWith the blood of a weary heart,And in the dew rusted awayThe wooden bodyAnd the buried hat.As for the words sweet and bitter,They flowed in a streamWhich began where you fellAnd where with dustYour mouth was filledUntil it slumbered in God's angry bosom,Begging Him to forgive some stupid guardsWho killed the last of the Lord's sons.

Elegies of Lorca *by 'Abd al- Wahhab al-Bayātī

IThe boar gores the belly of the stag.On his bed Enkidu dies,Sad and forlorn,As a worm dies in mud.The fate of Luqmán befell him in the end,And the fate of that seventh eagle of his.The acts of this play are now complete:Neither light nor life will you again greet.For fair Nature has destined men to dieAnd for herself kept the living flame through the sequence of seasons.

* From Al-Mawtfīal-Hayāt (Death in Life, 1968).

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What, O queen of mine, can I say of my demise,When the blue flameI have not seen and to its distant parts have not been?

IIA city is enchanted,On a river of silver and lemon erected:No man is born at her thousand portalsAnd no man meets the fate of all mortals.Surrounding her is a wall of gold,And shielding her from wind an olive wood.I saw her—wormsEating my face, in my blocked and decayed grave.'Shall I return?' I said to Mother Earth.She laughed, shook off me the mantle of wormsAnd rubbed my face with an abundance of light.I went back to my city, youthful and bedazzledGalloping on the back of my green wooden horse.At her thousand portals I yelled,But together slumber had tied eye-lidsAnd the enchanted city drownedIn blood and smoke.

IllThe sweet-scented ladyWith the black eyes and ear-ringsHas herself adorned with lime leaves and with blossoms,And with the water of the roses of fireAnd the rain-drops of dawn has herself perfumed.O Granada of happy childhood:A paper-kite, a poemStrung to this lightAnd rocking above the wall!O Granada of the innocent days!Eagerly she throws away her burden of the wind and of the stars,She lies under the snowflakes on roof-tilesPointing in fear at her black hillsWhence on the backs of the horses of DeathCame the warring brothersAnd sunk this house in blood.

IVA bull of silk and velvet blackBellows in the arena behind the horseman's back.Its horns rise in the air,Chasing the evening starAnd stabbing the enchanted horseman.There he lies with his broken sword,Blood-besmeared, in the light:

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Two red mouths, agape;Red anemones.At the foot of the mountain of superstitionBlood covers a willow tree.O red fountain!There is no henna in the markets of MadridRub, I pray thee, with this blood the hands of my love.O cry of a clownish crowd!There he dies,Whilst the bull, pierced in the arena, bellows full-throated.

To wash away the shame of forced deathHe thrust the point of the swordInto the heart of this night.He fought till deathFrom street to street.The villains caught up with himAnd in his body planted daggers;They cut the string which quivered in the sky—The green kite of infancyHas fallen in the trenches of the enemy.And orphaned GranadaIs now a slave for sale.Who would buy 'A'isha? Who would buy the Phoenix?A Babylonian princess captiveWith ear-rings from the gold of the city enchanted—Who would buy the princess?

VIThe city of necessityHeralds the world and man.Under the sky of her bare summerI face loss and legend,I face forgetfulness.O perpetual flux!The recurrent copiesIn this big machineAre eaten into by the rats.O Parrot of the besotted King! O Mistress of the Sultan!Climb the walls of museums!Make love to the reptiles!Gamble with the head of this rebel!There he is besieged from street to streetChased by daggers.

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Introduction

These four poems in translation' exemplify a widespread interest on the partof modern Arab poets in the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca (1898-1936).The poems have been selected because they are all explicitly devoted to Lorca,both in title and subject-matter. The Spanish poet is, however, invoked—whether by name or by association with his life or art—in innumerable otherArabic poems, a phenomenon which- invites extensive study, and which thisarticle will briefly explore.2

The composers of these poems are all eminent masters of the modernistmovement in Arabic poetry, who started to write (with the exception ofMahmud DarwTsh who is of a younger generation) in the late 1940s or early1950s, and reached their artistic maturity in the 1960s (incidentally, the periodto which all four poems belong). Of the four poets, two (Badr Shākir al-Sayyāband 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayātī) are Iraqi, while DarwTsh is Palestinian, andSalāh 'Abd al-Sabūr is Egyptian. This national diversity (within the boundariesof Arabic culture) in itself suggests that the Arab interest in Lorca extendsbeyond individual affinities on the part of particular poets, into the realms ofa literary phenomenon.

The meaning of Lorca to Arab poets cannot be explored without someacquaintance both with the life and art of the Spanish poet (and more import-antly, the circumstances of his violent and premature death at the hands of thefascist Right in Spain), and with the socio-political background and concernsof modern Arabic poetry. Closer examination of the four individual poemswill then serve to illustrate the way in which Lorca was regarded by the Arabpoets.

Lorca against fascism

Lorca was executed by Nationalist forces outside his native Granada on themorning of 19 August 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936—1939). Already a legendary figure in his life, his abrupt and bloody death at theage of thirty-eight could only have served to lift him to a still higher mythicalplane. Lorca's poetry, with its surrealism, evocation of folk verse, sensualityand creation of its own mythology, does not lend itself readily to political inter-pretation. In the words of one critic, Lorca's work has 'no direct politicalmeaning . . . The masses and what moved them as such did not interest him. . . ' 3 This view seems to be upheld by the poet's own dictum: 'I'll never be apolitician, never! Like all the true poets I'm a revolutionary, but a politician—never!'4 Ian Gibson, Lorca's biographer, tells us that the poet was 'a liberal inthe broadest sense of the word' and that, unlike many of his fellow-writers, 'henever joined a political party or identified himself with any particular left-winggroup . . . ' 5

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Thus a purely 'artistic' reading of the poet's work coupled with an all tooliteral adoption of the above statements might leave us wondering why theNationalists cared to murder Lorca and why he became an emblem for themartyred poet-rebel to Arab poets and other intellectuals the world over. Butit must be remembered that while Lorca stood aloof from direct politicalaction, he saw himself as a 'revolutionary' in the manner of'all true poets'. Onesense in which his revolutionary nature can be understood is his identificationin his early poetry with Granada's persecuted groups: Jews, Moors, negroesand gypsies.6 One scholar remarks not irrelevantly in this connection that,when Lorca visited the USA in 1929, 'the only part of New York he reallyliked was the negro part, Harlem'.7 His revolutionariness was of a visionarykind; the kind which touched the essence of human pathos without visiblyassociating itself with this or that cause or group. In his poem 'Cicada' writtenin 1918, he says:

May my blood on the fieldBe sweet rosy loamWhere tired labourersSink their hoes.8

In another poem, 'Cantos Nuevos' (New Songs), included in his first collection,Libro de Poemas (1921), he writes:

I thirst for fragrance and laughs,I thirst for new songsFree of moons or liliesAnd free of withered amours.

A song of tomorrow that will agitateThe tranquil watersOf the future. And will fill with hopeIts ripples and its slime.

A song reaching the spirit of things,And the spirit of the winds,A song finally resting in the joyOf the eternal heart.9

Lorca's sympathy for the 'tired field-labourers', his rejection of romanticism,and his 'seditious' song about 'agitating the tranquil waters of the future' willprobably do very little to qualify him as the author of left-wing political mani-festoes. Their 'revolutionary' content may, however, be best understood in thelight of Stephen Spender's words: 'Poetry which is not written in order toadvance any particular set of political opinions may yet be profoundlypolitical.'10

Lorca's major tragic dramas—Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934) and The

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House of Bernarda Alba (1936)—which all take as their subject frustratedwomanhood, are also, and perhaps more importantly, powerful metaphors ofthe triumph of death over life. Seen as such, and within the socio-politicalcontext of Spain at the time of their writing, they are certainly political, if onlyin the Spenderian sense. In retrospect, they also proved to have been propheticof the final triumph of fascism (that is, death) in Spain. Reluctant as Lorcawas to indulge in direct political argument, especially in his art, he can some-times let slip remarks which point unequivocally to where his sympathies lie.In The House of Bernarda Alba, the following conversation takes place betweentwo of the house maids:

Poncia: All we have is our hands and a hole in God's earth.Servant: And that's the only earth they'll [the land-owning class] ever leave to us—to

us who have nothing!'l

On the other hand, Bernarda, the mistress of the house, remarks to herself onone occasion that 'the poor are like animals—they seem to be made of differentstuff'. And on another occasion, she rebukes Poncia, her servant: 'Work andkeep your mouth shut. The duty of all who work for a living.'12

However much Lorca may have thought himself above politics, in the fever-ish period leading up to the Spanish Civil War when it was becoming increas-ingly necessary for intellectuals to determine clearly which side they stood on,he appears finally to have been politicised malgré luí. Ian Gibson considers itindisputable that Lorca took part, in the months before the outbreak of thecivil war, in gatherings of a markedly anti-fascist and Republican character.13

In an interview given to a Madrid daily newspaper on 1 April 1936, the poetsaid:

. . . The day when hunger is eradicated there is going to be the greatest spiritual ex-plosion the world has ever seen. We will never be able to picture the joy that will eruptwhen the Green Revolution comes. I'm talking like a real Socialist, arent' I?14

A month later, the May Day issue of a weekly magazine published this messagefrom him:

I send my affectionate greetings to all the workers of Spain, united on this May 1st bya passionate desire for a more just society.15

Again, in the last interview he gave before his death, it is very interesting tosee how he almost inadvertently defines his political position in the course ofspeaking about his artistic creed:

The idea of art for art's sake is something that would be cruel if it weren't, fortunately,so ridiculous. No decent person believes any longer in all that nonsense about pure art,art for art's sake. At this dramatic point in time, the artist should laugh and cry withthe people. We must put down the bunch of lilies and bury ourselves up to the waist inmud to help those who are looking for lilies . . .16

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Where the complexity of Lorca's art may have baffled the Nationalist forcesof reaction, such explicit pronouncements (coupled with his anti-Catholicism)would have defined his political position for them only too sharply. Signifi-cantly, the true revolutionary character of his art seems not to have been loston the Spanish masses who, despite their illiteracy, learnt his* songs by heart.An eye-witness of the civil war reports that 'the tunes and rhymes of his simplelittle songs became war songs of the "Reds" . ' 1 7 The same scholar tries toexplain this phenomenon in the following terms:

For a great part of his work is 'popular' in the sense that it touched his people asthough with the full charge of their own half-conscious feelings, intensified and trans-formed through his art. The emotional forces he released became part of the shapelessrevolutionary movements of Spain whether he intended or not. Thus it was, I think,inevitable that he was killed by obscure Fascist brutality and that his work became abanner to the Spanish masses.18

Thus it was also that some thirty years later, Lorca's poetry and, more import-antly, his 'martyrdom', became a banner to a generation of Arab poets whosaw themselves, as he did, as 'revolutionaries' fighting on the side of the peoplein a world still under the dominance of various kinds of fascism.

For those Arab poets who knew Lorca's work well enough to grasp theextent of the Arabic influence on both his sensibility and his poetry (such asal-Bayātī, who is conversant with Spanish and has lived in Spain for manyyears), the poet's expression of his deep reverence for the Arabic civilisationwhich once flourished in Spain, and particularly in Granada, could only furtherhave endeared him to them, in the same measure as it must have infuriated hisenemies in the ultra-catholic, Nationalist camp at the time. In an interviewshortly before the outbreak of the civil war, Lorca was asked what he thoughtof the fall of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. His reply was poign-antly candid:

It was a disastrous event, even though they say the opposite in the schools. An admir-able civilisation, and a poetry, architecture and delicacy unique in the world—all werelost to give way to an impoverished, cowed town, a wasteland populated by the worstbourgeoisie in Spain today.19

Poets and rebels

The history of much of the Arab world since the end of World War II hasbeen one of unceasing political and social turmoil. The struggle for nationalindependence from European colonialism gave way to the Palestinian questionand the Arab-Israeli conflict, which after four regional wars within a periodof forty years remains unsolved. Internally, the post-independence struggle tocreate a new just, progressive and democratic social order was often thwarted

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by opposing social forces, as the dream of democratic government and dignityfor the individual systematically fell victim to repressive dictatorial regimes.

The poets under discussion belonged to a generation who spent their child-hood in the shadow of a global war only to reach their maturity during anequally unsettling period of national contention and intellectual schism. Suchconditions call for choices to be made, and all four poets may be labelledprogressive leftists, with varying degrees of direct political involvement. Differ-ent as their poetic styles and individual backgrounds are, they all share aconcern for the ordinary people, the down-trodden classes, the repressed in-dividual. All hanker for social justice and political freedom, believing in theirpoetic art as a means of achieving these lofty goals, and all express a sense ofmission; a vision of the poet-hero, the man of words become a man ofaction—to the point of death if necessary. In this connection, Lorca seems tohave presented himself to them as the very embodiment of their high ideal. Tothem, his best and most meaningful poem was not one of words; it was hisown death.

It is perhaps understandable that the Iraqi poet, Sayyab (1926-64), whosepersecution for his political beliefs ranged from imprisonment to exile, shouldidentify with Lorca. In his poem, 'Garcia Lorca', through a gamut of imagerywhich mixes the mundane with the sublime, and the tender with the powerful,he portrays the poet as a positive, unstoppable, all-encompassing force of lifemoving forward with the inevitability of 'Fate' towards a new world and anew future symbolised by 'Columbus' Sail'.

Surprisingly, the Palestinian, Mahmūd DarwTsh (born 1942), uses the sametechnique of mixed imagery in his depiction of Lorca. Thus, the poet who isan 'earthquake' and 'a hurricane' is also 'music' and 'a chanted prayer': theeffect is again of a larger-than-life, all-encompassing figure. In imagery whichevokes the poetic world of Lorca himself, DarwTsh brings in a favourite themeamong modern Arab poets in general, namely that of the 'poet' as a 'doer', orthe 'word' becoming 'action': 'The noblest of swords is a song of your composi-tion.' On the other hand, Darwlsh's personal identification with Lorca, aspoet-fighter with poet-fighter, is parallelled by an implicit identification betweenfascist-ruled Spain and Israeli-usurped Palestine. Though not mentioned byname, we can read 'Palestine' each time Spain is cited or invoked. As inSayyab's poem, the final note here is a hopeful, forward-looking one:

The best news from Madrid [Jerusalem?]Will come tomorrow.

Again, through an accumulation of images partly inspired by Lorca's poeticrepertoire, the Egyptian poet, 'Abd al-Sabūr (1931-81), builds up a picture ofthe Spanish bard as the quintessence of all that is positive and beautiful in life.All the more so to augment our sense of horror in the second section of thepoem, when all this life is reduced to 'a heap; a wound above the hill'. In the

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end, the murdered poet is elevated into a Christ-figure. Thus, his death shouldbe seen by implication to redeem the world; the poem ends with the triumphof love as the poet-Christ begs his heavenly Father to forgive his killers.

Al-Bayātī's (born 1926) 'Elegies of Lorca' is ostensibly the longest and mostcomplex of all four poems, while BayatT himself is perhaps the one Arab poetwho has most assimilated the world of Lorca and repeatedly invoked it in hisown poetry for his own purposes. Commenting on the recurrence in his poetryof traditional Lorcaesque imagery, Bayati has this to say:

The appearance of the Black Guard 2 0 in my poetry coincides with the appearance inreality of the Black Guard in the Arab World. Therefore its appearance in my poetryshould not be seen as necessarily being a borrowing from Lorca. But assuming that itwas so, then it must be said that it was a necessary borrowing which came at the righttime because the conditions which prevailed in Spain from the beginning of the thirtiesresemble conditions in the Arab World, even though the details may be different.21

While this statement is extremely valuable for understanding the Lorcaesqueelements in BayatFs poetry, it is obviously equally relevant to the other poetsdiscussed here.

Another pronouncement by BayatT will be particularly helpful in appreciat-ing his intentions in 'Elegies of Lorca'. In the introduction to the secondvolume of his Diwan (collected poems, 1979), he writes:

Here I am searching in this enormous crowd [humanity]—which I cannot help butlove—for the mytho-historical hero to transform with a motion of the hand this sacredstraw and clay into flames of fire, into revolution. Indeed, I search while dreaming thatthis very enormous crowd will itself become the mytho-historical hero.22

For BayatT, Lorca was certainly a manifestation of his yearned-for mytho-his-torical hero; while a figure of historic reality, his ideals and his death transfer-red him to the higher plane of myth. Hence BayatFs association of Lorca inhis poem with the Babylonian mythical hero, Enkidu, who figures in The Epicof Gilgamesh. Enkidu is described in the epic as a wild human creature of thesteppes, of surpassing strength. He is at harmony with the beasts of the forest,and delivers them from hunters' snares and other hazards. This symbol of lifeand benign strength is destroyed by death, and his ghost comes back to describeto his disconsolate friend, Gilgamesh, the horror of the underworld.23 It is inthese mournful terms, representing the triumph of death over life, that BayatTsees the murder of Lorca.

Yet, within the framework of BayatT's vision heroes do not really die; theypass on the flame of their ideals eternally.24 Thus, the mytho-historical hero,the Enkidu-Lorca figure, comes back to 'the enchanted city' that is Granadaand, by extension, the world. It is as though Lorca were Enkidu, resurrectedto engage once more in combat with forces of darkness and death. But the

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'city's eye-lids were tied with slumber'; the historic moment was not right, sothe resurrected hero has to die again.

The poem is clearly influenced (especially in section IV) by Lorca's greatelegy, Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935), in which the Spanish poetsees in the murder by the bull of his bull-fighter friend a symbol of the triumphof death over life. In its sense of utter grief, summed up by the line: 'And thebull alone exultant!', Lorca's poem is very pessimistic. Into this sombreness,Bayati introduces a flicker of light. For while his Enkidu-Lorca hero still diesby the horns of the (fascist) bull, the bull itself is by no means 'exultant':'Pierced in the arena, [it] bellows full-throated.' Yet, the bull is not finallykilled; it is perhaps weakened by the heroic thrust, but lives on. Nor can it bekilled until what Bayati refers to above as 'the enormous crowd' and 'thesacred clay and straw', and less flatteringly in the poem as the 'clownish crowd',are transformed into revolutionaries worthy of their saviour-heroes. Hence hisangry cry at the end of the poem, in an attempt to shake his audience, 'theenormous crowd', into self-liberating action:

O Parrot of the besotted King! O Mistress of the Sultan!...Gamble with the head of this rebel!

Different as their poetic techniques may be, all four poets examined hereseem to share the same vision of Lorca, in which he emerges as the epitome ofthe ideal of the poet-rebel. BayatT seems to assign to both poets and rebels theself-same role in the making of history; he describes them as 'the two birds of thestorm which foretell revolution and make it '. 2 5 For Arab poets, Lorca, givenin the words of his brother, the 'interweaving of his life and work, [his] erasingof the limits between life and fiction',26 represents a kind of Christ-figure ableto bring revolutionary redemption beyond historical and geographical limits,equally relevant in Spain, Palestine, Iraq or indeed wherever the cause of Manis at stake. Hence Bavātī's factually, though not poetically, incorrect lines(emphasis added):

Lorca is dying, is dead:The Fascists executed him at night by the banks of the Euphrates.21

In the idolisation of Lorca and the sense of utter grief at his death whichcharacterise Arab poetry on the subject, there is perhaps an element of vicari-ous suffering tinged with a sense of guilt. It is as if Lorca had achieved whatArab poets have shrunk from: he had crossed the fearful barrier between poetand rebel, life and death.

Notes1 All translations from the Arabic are by the author of this article.2 For an informative skirmish in Arabic into the subject, see Ahmad 'Abd al-'Azīz, 'The Influence

of Federico Garcia Lorca on Contemporary Arabic Literature', Fusūl 3(4) Cairo, 1983.

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3 Arturo Barea, Lorca: the poet and his people, London: Faber & Faber, 1946, p 11. See alsoManuel Duran (ed.) Lorca: a collection of critical essays, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962, p 18.

4 Quoted in Ian Gibson, The Death of Lorca, London: W H Allen, 1973, p 40.5 Ibid.6 Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: the theatre beneath the sand, London: Marion Boyars, 1980, p 6.7 M Duran, p 33.8 Quoted in A Barea, pp 54 and 93.9 See J L Gili (ed), Lorca, London: Penguin Books, 1971, pp 11-12.

10 Quoted in A Barea, pp 24-5.11 Three Tragedies of Federico García Lorca, translated by Graham-Lujan and R L O'Connell,

London: Seeker & Warburg, 1959, p 161.12 Ibid, pp 163 and 193 respectively.13 See I Gibson, p 39.14 Ibid, p 40.15 Ibid, p 39.16 Ibid, p42.17 A Barea, p 12.18 Ibid, p11.19 Quoted in I Gibson, p 43. For a general discussion of the Arabic influence on Lorca's poetry

and sensibility, see Edwin Honig, Garcia Lorca, London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.2 0 Bayatfs Black Gua rd immediately invokes Lorca ' s Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard in which

the Guards ride 'black' horses with 'black' horseshoes. To Lorca, the Spanish Civil Guard(founded in 1844 to suppress banditry) was a brutal , anti-life, force of repression, their tradi-tional victims being the gypsies who, by contrast , symbolised to Lorca the vitality and spon-taneity of human nature. For more details see I Gibson, p 170; and also A Barea, p 17.

2 1 See Ahmed 'Abd al-'Azīz, p 287.2 2 See Diwān al-Bayātī(2) Beirut: D ā r al 'Awda, 1979, p 50.2 3 See S H H o o k e , Middle Eastern Mythology, L o n d o n : Penguin Books, 1983, p 50.2 4 See Diwan (2) Introduct ion, passim.2 5 See Diwan (2) p 33.26 See Three Tragedies of Federico García Lorca, Introduct ion by Francisco García Lorca, p p 4 - 5 .2 7 See B a y ā t i s poem, ' D e a t h in G r a n a d a ' , Diwan (2) p 334.

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