Dance of Death

The mask. Look how the mask

Comes from Africa to New York.

They are gone, the pepper trees,

the tiny buds of phosphorus.

They are gone, the camels with torn flesh,

and the valleys of light the swan lifted in its beak.

It was the time of parched things,

the wheat spear in the eye, the laminated cat,

the time of tremendous, rusting bridges

and the deadly silence of cork.

It was the gathering of the dead animals

pierced by the swords of light.

The endless joy of the hippopotamus with cloven feet of ash

And of the gazella with an immortelle in its throat.

In the withered, waveless solitude

the dented mask was dancing.

Half of the world was sand,

The other half mercury and dormant sunlight.

The mask. Look at the mask!

Sand, crocodile, and fear above New York.  

While the Chinaman wept on the roof,

not finding the nude of his wife,

and the bank director examined the manometer

that measures the cruel silence of money,

the mask arrived on Wall Street.

It isn’t a strange place for the dance,

these cemetery niches that turn the eyes yellow.

Between the sphinx and the bank vault, there is a taut thread

that pierces the heart of all poor children.

The primitive impetus dances with the mechanical impetus,

unaware, in their frenzy, of the original light.

Because if the wheel forgets its formula,

it will sing nude with herds of horses;

and if a flame burns the frozen blueprints,

the sky will have to flee before the tumult of windows.

From Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca

Translated from Spanish by Greg Simon and Steven E. White

A few weeks ago, I watched Mariana Pineda, a play by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I have read Lorca quite a bit, but the poetic dialogue in this play impressed me. I thought he could have become the greatest Spanish-speaking writer of all time if fascists had not assassinated him during the Spanish Civil War. What a loss to Humanity! In 1929, he spent eight months in New York, where he studied English at Columbia University’s summer school. Life in the city of gigantic buildings impacted him. His verses speak for themselves:

While the Chinaman wept on the roof,

not finding the nude of his wife,

and the bank director examined the manometer

that measures the cruel silence of money,

the mask arrived on Wall Street.

It isn’t a strange place for the dance …

  Poet in New York was published after Lorca’s death.