Every song
is a suspension
of love

and every star
is a suspension
of time

a distention

of time

and every breath
a suspension

of grief

Translated by Peter Jukes from Cada Cancion by Gabriel Garcia Lorca

And when I go
leave the window open

The boy is eating oranges
(I see him from my window)

The reaper is cutting down the corn
(I hear him from my window)

So when I go
leave the window open

Translated by Peter Jukes from Lorca's Despedida

The boy was looking for his voice
(The king of crickets had stolen it)

deep inside a water drop
the boy was looking for his voice

I don't want it for talking
I want it to make a ring
that my reticence can wear
around its little finger

Deep inside a water drop
the boy was looking for his voice

(Meanwhile in the distance
the voice was dressed up like a cricket)

Translated by Peter Jukes from El Niño Muda by Lorca

From Theory and Function of Duende

Once, the Andalusian ‘Flamenco singer’ Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines, sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent.

In the room was Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman tortoise, who was once asked: ‘Why don’t you work?’ and who replied with a smile worthy of Argantonius: ‘How should I work, if I’m from Cadiz?’

In the room was Elvira, fiery aristocrat, whore from Seville, descended in line from Soledad Vargos, who in ’30 didn’t wish to marry with a Rothschild, because he wasn’t her equal in blood. In the room were the Floridas, whom people think are butchers, but who in reality are millennial priests who still sacrifice bulls to Geryon, and in the corner was that formidable breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murube, with the look of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished her song in silence. Only, a little man, one of those dancing midgets who leap up suddenly from behind brandy bottles, sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something other.’

Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.

La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters...

Lorca translation's on this site

The Silent Child

Farewell

Song of the Arid Orange Tree

Every Song

Woodcutter, woodcutter
Cut me from my shadow,
Free me from the burden
Of seeing myself barren.

Why must I live amid these mirrors?
The sun looks down askance
While night comes out to mock me
With every single star

But living without reflection
I'd dream the ants and hawks
Cover my boughs like foliage
And sing in my leaves like birds.

Woodcutter, woodcutter
Cut me from my shadow,
Free me from the burden
Of seeing myself barren.

Peter Jukes: translated from Lorca's Cancion del Naranjo Seco