Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, considered Federico García Lorca’s masterpiece, describes the tragic death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a famous bullfighter and García Lorca’s close friend. A professional torero who loved literature and music and wrote poetry, Sánchez Mejías retired from bullfighting in 1927. Considering a comeback, he accepted an injured friend’s request to replace him on August 11, 1934, in the scheduled corrida (bullfights) of Manzanares (Ciudad Real).
Before the event, many things went wrong, and the bullfighter confessed to his friends a feeling that this fight would be his last. The premonition turned to prophecy, and García Lorca, who could not be in town during the fight, arrived too late to witness it. The tragedy deeply impressed the poet, who saw in Ignacio’s end a reenactment of the eternal drama: a poet meeting his fate. García Lorca had explored this theme in his earlier works; but in the Lament, written at the height of his poetic career, the idea receives García Lorca’s most personal and fullest expression.
The poem consists of four separately subtitled sections that, by revisiting the details of the fatal bullfight and paying tribute to the killed torero, trace the complex process of coming to terms with death.
The first part, The Goring and the Death (La cogida y la muerte), balances terse, mesmerizing images—the bells of arsenic, a coffin with wheels, death laying eggs in the wound—against the drummed, one-verse refrain “a las cinco de la tarde” (at five in the afternoon). Constantly repeated, this allusion to the standard time at which bullfights begin becomes an eerie harbinger of the inevitable, a bell tolling for the dead and building up to the climax of open terror: “¡Ay, qué terribles cinco de la tarde!” (How horrifying, these fives [of] the afternoon!).
The emotion bursts open in The Spilled Blood (La sangre derramada), where the poet shifts from the detached third-person to the more personal “I” that refuses to accept Ignacio’s end. An emphatic leitmotif—“¡Que no quiero verla!” (I don’t want to see it!), referring to Ignacio’s blood—grows stronger throughout the poem; and its final resolute rendition “No. / ¡¡Yo no quiero verla!!” (No. I won’t look at it, ever!) is an act of rebellion against death.
In the two parts that follow—Presence of the Body (Cuerpo presente) and Absence of the Soul (Alma ausente)—the rebellious tone gives way to confused awareness and eventual acceptance of the irreversible. But the challenge to death grows stronger when, in a tone of resigned calmness, García Lorca affirms poetry as the force to resist oblivion: “No te conoce nadie. No. Pero yo te canto. / Yo canto para luego tu perfil y tu gracia.” (No one knows you. No one. But I sing you— / sing your profile and grace, for later on.)
In this poem García Lorca, with sublime harmony, reconciled the influences that had inspired him throughout his life. Gypsy lament, medieval ballad, and surrealist imagery—all come together to transform one bullfighter’s accidental death into an expression of the universal drama of humankind. More important, the poem achieves a buildup of strength to face that drama with dignity.
Bibliography
García Lorca, Federico. Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías. Translated by Alan Trueblood. In The Poetical Works of Federico García Lorca. Vol. 2, Collected Poems, edited by Christopher Maurer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.
Categories: Literature, Spanish Literature, World Literature
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