"I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock- market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness.... I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings."
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), Spanish poet, playwright. Lecture, March 1932, Madrid. "A Poet in New York," published in Poet in New York (1940, trans. 1988). |
"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog."
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), Spanish poet, playwright. Lecture, March 1932, Madrid. "A Poet in New York," Poet in New York (1940, trans. 1988). |
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Federico García Lorca
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