The Myth of Lorca: International Lorquismo and Lorca’s

Reception in Cyprus and the Hellenic World

Demetra Demetriou

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 58, Number 1, 2021, pp. 176-206

(Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/781868

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 the myth of lorca: international lorquismo
and lorca’s reception in cyprus and
the hellenic world

Demetra Demetriou

abstract
This article aims to examine Federico García Lorca’s reception in Cypriot
literature within the context of his wider Hellenic and international poster-
ity. To place the Lorca image fostered on the island in the ideological and
intertextual framework of a more generic lorquismo enables us to enrich our
perspective on the writer’s transnational radiation, as well as to appreciate the
distinctive contribution of Cypriot literature to the formation of Lorquian
mythology, powerfully imbued with the historical experience of Hellenism
in Cyprus. The article focuses on the ideological importance of Lorca’s
assassination and traces the writer’s reception in the Greek world at earlier
stages than commonly thought. It further explores the persistence of the
myth well into the decades that followed World War II and examines its
symbolic value down to our day, gradually moving beyond a politicized—and
toward an aestheticized—view of his poetry. Drawing on a comparativist
myth-critical framework, my approach is more particularly concerned with
the study of Lorca as a mythical figure, which may account for the scope of
significations he has embodied as a character in a cross-cultural perspective,
as well as for the reasons why he remains so flexible within varied traditions.
keywords: Federico García Lorca, Reception, Spanish Civil War,
Greece, Cyprus

doi: 10.5325/complitstudies.58.1.0176
comparative literature studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 2021.
Copyright © 2021. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

176
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 177

You have reached Cyprus, Federico. / Don’t be confused. / You’ll

feel like home in Granada.
—Andry Christofidou-Antoniadou

Approaching Lorca: From Poet to Myth

Lorca is perhaps the most celebrated foreign writer in the Greek world.
A number of scholarly contributions have studied his literary fortune in
Greece and demonstrated his unprecedented popularity in translations,
musical adaptations, and stagings of his plays1—eloquently summarized in
terms of a “Greek Lorcomania.”2 However, his legacy in Cypriot poetry is a
subject that has remained unexplored within the context of the writer’s overall
Greek reception. Most importantly, these studies have failed to trace Lorca’s
early (and ongoing) reception by Greek Cypriot writers, a study area that
may offer new insights into Lorca’s overall reception in the Greek cultural
sphere. Furthermore, previous research has privileged aesthetic criteria of
comparison or cultural and historical convergences between Greece and
Spain; instead, this article places more emphasis on the ideological nucleus
of Lorca’s mythical stature, which prevails, as I hope to show, over the terms
of his poetic revival to date.
This article aims to examine Lorca’s reception in Cyprus within the
context of his wider Hellenic and international posterity. To place the Lorca
image fostered on the island in the ideological and intertextual framework of
a more generic lorquismo enables us to enrich our perspective on the writer’s
international reception, as well as to appreciate the distinctive contribution
of Cypriot literature to the formation of Lorquian mythology, powerfully
imbued with the historical experience of Hellenism in Cyprus. The article
focuses on the ideological importance of Lorca’s assassination and some
strands of his poetry and traces the writer’s reception in the Hellenic world
at earlier stages than commonly thought. It further explores the persistence
of the myth well into the decades that followed World War II and explores
its symbolic value down to our day, gradually moving beyond a politi-
cized—and toward an aestheticized—view of his poetry. By focusing on a
less-studied topic, the article contributes to the discussion of an important
subject in Spanish-Greek literature comparative scholarship from a different
perspective.
Drawing on a myth-critical framework, my approach is more partic-
ularly concerned with the study of Lorca as a mythical figure, which may
account for the scope of significations he has embodied as a character in a
178 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

cross-cultural perspective, as well as for the reasons why he remains so flex-

ible within varied traditions. Former French comparativist Marius François
Guyard, who identified the “study of themes” with the “study of (character)
types,” labels as “literary myths” those that “evolve around and in relation to
writers.”3 He cites, in this respect, René Étiemble’s monumental Le Mythe de
Rimbaud as an illustrative example. As restrictive as this definition of “literary
myth” might be today, Guyard takes the lead in raising the mythification
of a writer as an object of study in itself. The theoretical accounts on the
notion of “literary myth” have been significantly enriched by contemporary
French comparativists, who established the study of recent literary myths,
including historical figures who have been mythicized by their exceptional
artistic fortune.4 In this respect, the role of literature becomes primordial in
the mythification process, for it no longer draws upon a given tradition but
provides the very mythopoeic stimulus. This framework merits particular
consideration in the case of Lorca, for the poet’s literary image is a signif-
icant feature—or the significant feature, at least in the early stages—of his
international reception, which precedes and often emulates his influence
as a writer. For this “Lorcomania” is not a merely Greek phenomenon and
needs to be traced back to the wake of the emotions raised by Lorca’s death
among the Western intellectual circles, the majority of which sided with the
legitimate Republican government.5 For Lorca did not die in Granada as a
particular individual, but as a Spanish Republican. Or so the myth tells us,
that we shall now call his myth.

Republican Lorcas: From Spain to Cyprus and the Greek

Community in Egypt

According to historian Aldo Garosci, Lorca’s assassination was the incident

of the war that “most quickly and completely acquired the value of a symbol.”6
The number of publications issued in the immediate aftermath of his death
concurs with and further clarifies this view. Rafael Alberti’s El Mono Azul
(17 September 1936) was the first to offer its tribute to Lorca in its foremost
section “Romancero de la Guerra Civil.” Aside from commemorative events
and stagings of his plays, the Hispanic world met with a plethora of Lorca
anthologies at the time.7 These include Breve Antología (1936), published by
the League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers of Mexico; Antología selecta
de Federico García Lorca (1937), issued in Argentina, with an emblematic
preface by Pablo Neruda; Poeta fusilado (1937), published in Montevideo,
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 179

consisting entirely in Lorca poetic memorials; and Antología (1937), printed

in Chile at the initiative of Spanish intellectual María Zambrano.
Back in the peninsula, Prados’ two-hundred-page anthology Homenaje
al poeta García Lorca contra su muerte (1937) is the most voluminous body of
texts dedicated to Lorca at the time. Furthermore, the publications diffused
among the participants of the Second International Writers’ Congress
in Defence of Culture, held at Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris in
1937, consolidated Lorca’s mythical stature on an international scale: these
include Poetas en la España leal (1937), opening with Antonio Machado’s
renowned poem about Lorca, “El crimen fué en Granada” (The crime was
in Granada); and the Romancero general de la guerra de España (1937), which
bears the dedication “To Federico García Lorca.” It should be noted that
this Congress is a major event in the literary and intellectual history of the
twentieth century for the number and the notoriety of the authors it came
to mobilize. It further disseminated a new intellectual culture that had
emerged out of the First Soviet Writers Congress (1934), by raising issues
of ethics, politics, and aesthetics that marked some of the major postwar
literary debates. Not surprisingly, the assassination of Lorca was placed at
the center of the participants’ interest and was given a significant mediatic
resonance. His play Mariana Pineda, directed by Manuel Altoaguirre,
offered an emblematic opening to the Valencia sessions, in presence of the
Loyalist premier, Juan Negrín.8 The closing Parisian session was further
held under the overwhelming gaze of Lorca, whose portrait was raised
above the speakers’ platform. Before long, the British communist poet,
Stephen Spender, who attended the sessions in Madrid, would engage in
introducing Lorca to the English-speaking audience. By the end of the
war, Spender publishes the first English translation of poems by Lorca.9 In
addition, Spender’s anthology Poems for Spain (1939), consisting of poems
in support of the Republican cause, features an entire section dedicated to
(and named after) Lorca.
All these volumes, driven by enthusiasm and idealism, disseminated
a heroic picture of Lorca that has hardly abandoned him ever since, along
which his very reception as a writer evolved and has been shaped over time.
As Garosci observes, Lorca’s poetry, mobilized in the Loyalist cause, “was
raised to represent, before a wider public, the poetry, all poetry, annihilated
by cruelty and barbarism.”10 Garosci further contends that Lorca’s mul-
tifaceted work, “apolitical in itself,” came to be “translated into politics,”
delimited to some kind of “revolutionary Messianism.”11 Jorge Luis Borges
goes so far as to call Lorca a “second-rate poet,”12 “who had the good luck
to be executed.”13
180 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

In a similar vein, the eminent leftist Greek poet Manolis Anagnostakis,

who back in 1946 praised Lorca as “a fighter in the forefront of the Spanish
proletariat,”14 came to attest, thirty years later, that what defined Lorca’s
“hysteric[al]” appeal in Greece was due to “extra-literary reasons,”15 at
the expense—he goes on to argue—of other notable Spanish poets of his
generation.16 Critic Antonio García Guzmán further holds that the Greek
public has read Lorca in partial ways, centered on the folkloric features
of his poetry; indicatively, Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York) was
translated only just in the 1970s.17 On the side of the Liberals, Greek Nobel-
laureate George Seferis alludes to the monopoly of Lorca by particular
“political tendencies” to the detriment of the poet himself.18 Some critics
invite thus a reassessment of the terms of Lorca’s Greek reception or even
raise the issue of literary value. Kokolis, for instance, refers to “multiple and
multiply interrelated”19 factors that are to be taken into consideration and
Filippis draws attention to a “Lorcomania” which might—eventually—be
“epidermic.”20
However, is such an abundant legacy that spans time and nations to
be taken solely as “an instrument of propaganda,”21 or, as Salvador Dalí
playfully puts it, “a vile blackmail” on behalf of “[t]he reds, the semi-reds,
the pinks, and even the pale pinks”?22 Besides, the fostering of the legend is
not the sole prerogative of the Left: “the favorite of the Government”23 or
“a ‘coreligionist’ of Azaña”24 are some of the labels Lorca was given by the
Nationalist press, both before and after the Granada killings. Madrilenian
conservative dailies went so far as to associate Lorca’s theatre company, “La
Barraca,” with “‘Marxist,’ ‘Jewish,’ and ‘Communist’ agitators determined
to bring the Red Revolution to Spain.”25 Not to mention the myth of the
Lorca “Falangist,” due to his acclaimed friendship with the leader of the
Spanish fascist party, José Antonio Primo de Rivera—to quote a piece by
Falangist paper Unidad (paradoxically glossed with a “touch” of Machado):

The crime was in Granada, and there was no light to brighten the
sky which you now possess. . . . The Falange is waiting for you; its
welcome is Biblical: Comrade, your faith has saved you.26

To suggest, though, that Lorca performs a mere ideological function, espe-

cially for the groups that sustained the Loyalist cause, would be extremely
reductive. Whether “Red,” “White,” or “pink and purple,” Lorca crystallized
in his person and epitomized with his death the rival ideologies of the
time, offering new ways to rethink social and political violence at times of
collective delirium across time and space. However, one is led to recognize
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 181

the significance of the pro-Republican literature in creating a system of

inheritance that defined the world’s collective memory with regard to the
Lorca affair. These poetic memorials are not, thus, to be underestimated as
a sole form of reception or as tentative poems to be dismissed, but, on the
contrary, as the very source that consolidated Lorca’s reputation both as a
writer and as the principal martyr of the Spanish Civil War.
By taking on board the ideological, cultural, literary, and ultimately sym-
bolic implications of these tributes, the origins of Lorca’s exceptional fortune
in the Hellenic world are to be sought in the turmoil of the interwar period.
The absence of any direct literary response to the events of the Spanish War,
both in metropolitan Greece and Cyprus, is of no surprise. The censorship
practiced by the Metaxas ruling dictatorship in Greece (1936–1941)—espe-
cially at the early stages of the war when Lorca was killed—led to biased
press coverage in favor of the Nationalists.27 On a diplomatic plane, the
Metaxas regime chose to pursue a policy of neutrality toward Spain, following
the Franco-British Non-Intervention Agreement.28 As a result, the Lorca
obituary by renowned Greek writer Nicos Kazantzakis, published in the
pro-Metaxist daily of Kathimerini, carefully avoids attributing responsibili-
ties concerning Lorca’s death.29 Albeit a fervent admirer of Lorca, whom he
met in Madrid in 1932, as well as his first translator in Greek, Kazantzakis
flees the Lorca poetic “epidemic” of the time. Besides, due to the ideological
affinities between Metaxas’ “New State” (Neon Kratos) and Franco’s “Nuevo
Estado,” any mention of Lorca in an anti-fascist framework would have
hardly been voiced.
Due precisely to the Anglo-French policy of nonintervention, a prohi-
bition against providing human and material aid to Spain was also imposed
in Cyprus,30 which was a British colony at the time. Following the events of
October 1931, whereby Cypriots saw their ideal of union with Greece (Enosis)
violently frustrated, the authoritarian measures were significantly intensified
on the island.31 Against this background, the Cypriot people involved in
fundraising and a significant amount secretly made its way to Spain.32 What
is more, the Cypriots who fought in the ranks of the International Brigades
represent the second largest contingent of any country, in proportion to
the population of Cyprus at the time.33 The Cypriot contribution might
well have been larger, had not the British banned the export of personnel
and materiel from Cyprus to Spain. Cypriot volunteers, most of whom of
working-class backgrounds and involved in the communist parties of their
resident countries hailed, thus, to the peninsula mainly from London and
New York.34 Their anti-imperialist motivation is significant to the point I
wish to make here, for their opposition to fascism had been linked to their
182 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

own experience of colonialism and, in the words of the commander of

the British Battalion, Bill Alexander, the struggle “for their own national
independence.”35
Given these circumstances, the origins of Lorca’s Greek reception are
to be sought in the Greek diaspora, most notably in the Greek commu-
nity of Egypt, which had developed a vivid anti-fascist activity at the time.
In the cosmopolitan city of Cairo, the ground was more favorable for a direct
contact with the European interbellum, under the noticeable influence of a
specifically leftist and/or Democrat intelligentsia (including George Seferis,
who held posts in the Middle East in those years), who sympathized with the
Republican cause. Not surprisingly, the first mention of Lorca and the Spanish
Civil War in the Hellenic world is found in a fervently anti-fascist collection by
the Cypriot poet Thodosis Pierides (1908–1968), at the time residing in Cairo,
titled Ξέρουμε κ’εμείς να τραγουδούμε (We also know how to sing) (1937). The
very title of the collection functions as a poetic manifesto that rejects the aes-
thetic of “pure poetry” in favor of a committed perspective. Lorca is mentioned
in a lengthy poem that Pierides dedicates “To J.M. who went to fight in Spain.”
Pierides’ use of traditional verse recalls some of the major poems by the national
poet of Greece and bard of the Greek War of Independence, Dionysios Solomos.
Pierides’ Democratic Spain appears personified, borrowing on the imagery of
Solomos’ heroic “Liberty”36 or even his wounded “Glory,”37 the siege of Madrid
is identified with the Ottoman siege of Missolonghi,38 and the Republican
heroine Lina Odena follows the women of Souli on their mortal “Dance of
Zalongo”39 under the sound of “No passaran! [sic]”—recalling Lorca’s female
counterpart in myth, La Pasionaria. In the name of Lorca, an incantatory list
of names and events in Greek history is powerfully instilled, uniting Pierides’
nationalist aspirations with a broader quest of international socialism:

Οι δέκα σφαίρες που’ρριξαν στη γης τον Γκάρθια Λόρκα

δεν του τρυπήσαν την ψυχή και δεν του τη χαλάσαν . . .
Γιατί όπως στάθηκε μπροστά στο ματωμένο τοίχο
και πρόσμενε το θάνατο με ορθάνοιχτα τα μάτια,
……………………………………………………
τότε η μεγάλη του ψυχή με τις δροσιές της όλες
και μ’όλα τα τραγούδια της και μ’όλη τη φωτιά της,
πετάχτη από το στόμα του και πέταξε, σαν είπε:
“Εμένα κι’α σκοτώνετε, η λευτεριά θα ζήσει!”40
(The ten bullets that knocked down to earth García Lorca
did not pierce his soul and they didn’t come to spoil it . . .
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 183

For when he stood before the bleeding wall

awaiting death with eyes wide open,
…………………………………..…
his noble soul with all its dew, its songs, and all its fire
gushed from his mouth and flew away by saying:
“You might kill me, but liberty shall live!”)

This idealized image of Lorca as stoic and serene rolls along with the poems
that offer an immediate impression of Spain, coming from the ranks of the
broader Left. Pierides’ annotation to the poem demonstrates his familiarity
with the relevant literature around Lorca. However, compared to the well-
known poems that pertain to this tradition, Pierides’ tribute does not move
along with the denouncing tone of a Machado or the elegiac flair of an
Hernández; rather, the vile aspect of the incident is superseded by a tran-
scending movement, mobilized, as in Solomos, by the Romantic belief in a
revolutionary ideal. In fact, Lorca’s gaze in Pierides is not directed to this
world, but rather contemplates a world beyond it. Was Lorca truly awaiting
death “with eyes wide-open,” as Pierides suggests? One would have to ask
Lorca. However, this figure is highly conceived in Solomos’ mold, standing
against death with the “open” and “vigilant” eyes of the soul,41 experienc-
ing a moment of self-awareness and liminality, just like the swimmer of
O Πόρφυρας (The Shark) or Οι Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι (The Free Besieged)
of Missolonghi.
While Kazantzakis, who worked as a correspondent in Spain for
Kathimerini during the civil war, praises “The Free Besieged of Alcázar”42 in
support of the Nationalists, Pierides puts forth Solomos on the Republican
side and the ideal for social change. The way Lorca and Alcázar, two of the
major—and radically competing—mythologies of the two camps, reclaim
Solomos’ inheritance is of compelling interest, in this respect. The Spanish
War remains a point of reference for Pierides’ later work as well. Indicatively,
his major, epico-lyrical poem Κυπριακή Συμφωνία (Cypriοt Symphony),
composed at the outbreak of the Cypriot anti-colonial national liberation
struggle (1955–1959), echoes significantly in tone—and enters into intertextual
dialogue with—Pablo Neruda’s España en el corazón (Spain in My Heart).43
Pierides’ admiration for Lorca arguably evolves out of shared aes-
thetic and convergences with the Egyptian-Greek writer, Stratis Tsirkas
(1911–1980), who would later acquire international fame for his trilogy
Ακυβέρνητες πολιτείες (Drifting Cities). Both writers became actively
involved in the Egyptian Communist movement and later took a leading
role in the anti-fascist and anti-Nazi struggle in Egypt. Most significantly,
184 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

Tsirkas traveled as a Greek delegate to the Parisian session of the afore-

mentioned Second International Writers’ Congress, in July 1937. His par-
ticular contribution to this Congress remains, however, a largely forgotten
link in the history of international lorquismo. In fact, Tsirkas composed
there—encouraged by the African-American poet Langston Hughes—
an “Oath” to Lorca, which found its way to Louis Aragon through the
mediation of Hughes’ notorious friend, Nancy Cunard.44 The poem was
recited by Aragon himself at the closing ceremony (in an English trans-
lation by Hughes), then signed by forty acclaimed participants, including
Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, Langston Hughes, Tristan Tzara, Robert
Desnos, Ilya Ehrenburg, Aleksey Tolstoy, Alejo Carpentier, José Bergamín,
and Nicolas Guillén.45 In the name of Lorca, a new poetic ethic is being
promoted, where speech as action becomes the highest sphere of human
engagement:

Στ’όνομά σου, Φεντερίκο Γκαρθία Λόρκα,

που σκοτώθηκες στην Ισπανία για τη λευτεριά
του ζωντανού λόγου,
Εμείς, ποιητές απ’όλες τις χώρες του κόσμου,
…………………………………………….…
παίρνουμε εδώ τον όρκο τον κοινό,
τ’όνομά σου να μην ξεχαστεί ποτές πάνω στη γης,
κι όσο υπάρχει τυραννία και καταπίεση,
στ’όνομά σου
να τις πολεμούμε
όχι μονάχα με το λόγο
μα και με τη ζωή μας.46
(In your name, Federico García Lorca,
killed in Spain for the freedom
of living speech,
We, poets from all the countries of the world,
…………………………………………..…..
take here the common oath,
that your name shall never be forgotten on the earth,
and, as long as tyranny and oppression exist,
in your name,
we shall fight them
not only with our words,
but also, with our lives.)
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 185

Tsirkas’ “Oath” was later published in his collection Το λυρικό ταξίδι (The
lyrical journey) (1938). Although Tsirkas has been reported as the first writer
to refer to Lorca in the Greek world,47 the publication of Pierides’ “Farewell”
precedes significantly by a year. Nevertheless, one is led to recognize that
Tsirkas’ “Oath” takes on highly symbolic resonances, having forged the
memory of Lorca as inextricable from communal identity and survival. Not
surprisingly, an emblematic figure of the Cypriot Left, Marxist poet Tefkros
Anthias (1903–1968), who would later become a founding member of the
Cypriot Communist Party (AKEL), praises Tsirkas in his 1939 review of The
Lyrical Journey, with a particular emphasis on Lorca’s assassination, social
realism aesthetics, and freedom of expression.48
Informed by the same ideological framework, Cypriot writer Nicos
Nicolaides (1884–1956), who acted as a mentor for young poets in the Greek
community of Egypt, especially Pierides and Tsirkas, dedicates his “Federico
García Lorca” to the Spanish poet.49 Composed around (or even before)
1945,50 this poem may be said to be one of the first Lorca Greek elegies.
Having recognized its faults and weaknesses, Nicolaides claims to have
saved it from disaster for highly emotional reasons, as his letter addressed to
Tsirkas (20 July 1955) testifies: “Nομίζω πως θα ’ταν ασέβεια (ασέβεια στον
Λόρκα εννοώ) να μη το δημοσιεύσω και να το καταστρέψω”51 (I think that
it would be disrespectful (disrespectful to Lorca I mean) not to publish it
and destroy it).
Nicolaides espoused Socialism in the early 1920s in Limassol. From then
on, he gradually moved away from an early aestheticism toward a literature
of social concern. During the Metaxas dictatorship, he refused to send his
collections to Greece as a kind of protest against the censorship imposed by
the regime, contrary to the wider silence of (liberal) Greek intellectuals at
the time. His poem for Lorca acquires thus a political/hagiographical tone,
while it bears the traceable mark of Angelos Sikelianos’ Orphism:
Santo Federico Garcia Lorca
poeta e martyre!
Η έπαρσή Σου,
σα Σε «στήσανε στον τοίχο»,
πρέπει να’ταν
σαν αυτή που’δα μια μέρα στη Γρανάδα, σ’ένα ρόδο
……………………………………………………..
T’άλικό Σου,
που’βρεξε τη γης αίμα,
να! υψώθη,
186 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

…………..
ανάμεσα στ’Αστάχι και το Κλήμα,
σαν το πολύφυλλο το Ρόδο
τ’Ορφικό!52
(Santo Federico García Lorca
poeta e martyre!
Your pride
as they put You against the wall,
must have been
like the one I saw one day in Granada, in a rose.
………………………………………….………
Your scarlet color blood that soaked the earth,
behold! has risen
………………...
amid the Vine and the Grain
like the multi-petal Orphic rose.)

The end of World War II finds Lorca at the center of the Greek intellectual
life: Nicos Kavadias’ “Federico García Lorca” (1945), the 1948 translation
of Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads) by Odysseus Elytis, and the staging
of Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) by the Art Theatre of Karolos Koun
are some of the factors that brought about the image of a “Greek Lorca.”53
However, given the evidence so far provided—and if research is not to be
delimited within the borders of the Greek State—, Mario Vitti’s assertion
that “Lorca finally entered Greece after the war [i.e. World War II]”54
could be called into question. Antonis Indianos’55 extensive essay on Lorca,
published in the Cypriot periodical Kypriaka Grammata in 1939, is a case
in point.56 Although existing scholarship documents Elytis’ essay “Federico
García Lorca” (1945) as the first to have presented Lorca’s poetics to the Greek
readership,57 Indianos’ text precedes it by six years in introducing Lorca to
Greek readers. In this respect, it should be noted that Kypriaka Grammata
had a significant print run and was distributed in Cyprus, Greece and Egypt,
with eminent Greek and Cypriot-Egyptian contributors—including Tsirkas,
Pierides and Nicolaides. Most importantly, Indianos accompanies his article
with a translation of four poems by Lorca; these are the first to appear in
Greek after Lorca’s death, and the second after Kazantzakis’ 1933 pioneering
Lorca translations.58
Interestingly, Indianos notes that his essay is indebted to R. M. Nadal’s
introduction to the Spender/Gili Lorca translation of Poems, the first, as we
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 187

have seen, to appear in a book-length English edition.59 Nadal’s introduction

remains noteworthy for having provided good information about Lorca to
English-speaking audiences at such an early stage.60 Indianos’ direct response
to this introduction on a colonial soil, given the widespread censorship at
the time, may be qualified as both a bold and a pioneering enterprise. Apart
from an emphasis on Lorca’s sensibility toward the peasants, the workers, and
racial minorities, and otherwise faithfully reproducing—quasi translating—
Nadal’s overall criticism, Indianos’ own comments testify to the ideological
background that may account for Lorca’s early reception in Cyprus. While
for Nadal, Lorca’s Mariana Pineda “is not the blind lover of Liberty” and
does not die “for a political ideal,”61 for Indianos, the heroine “symbolizes
the poet’s love for Liberty.”62 And while Nadal asserts that the play “is not,
as some have claimed to see in it, a drama of the liberal struggles,”63 Indianos
seems to concur with a “Republican” reading of the play, most probably related
to his own nationalist beliefs within the broader anti-colonial agitation in
Cyprus. In any case, Indianos’ contribution, Anthias’ review of Tsirkas, and
the poems by Pierides, Tsirkas, and Nicolaides enable us to place the early
stages of Lorca’s Hellenic reception in the decade of the 1930s and the early
1940s, at the crossroads of two different—but closely interrelated—trends: on
the one hand, the anti-colonial/nationalist struggle of the people of Cyprus
and Egypt and on the other, the spread of Socialist ideas among progressive
Cypriot intellectuals in the 1920s.

Postwar Lorcas: Lorca and the Cypriot “Generation of the 1960s”

After World War II, a number of poets and artists from across the political
sphere engaged with the work of the Spaniard. Cypriot poet Pavlos
Krineos (1903–1986), who spent most of his life in Athens, evokes Lorca
quite frequently in his poetry. In his poem “Για ποιόνε χτυπά η καμπάνα”
(For Whom the Bell Tolls), titled after Hemingway’s eponymous novel
about Spain, the need for commitment does not stem from partisan
beliefs, but rather refers to a collective responsibility of ecumenical
concern.

Κάποιος στενάζει. Εσύ ’σαι; . . . .

ο Γκάρθια Λόρκα, ο Αβραάμ Λίκολν, ο Βικέντιος Βαν Γκογκ;
κάποιος δακρύζει σκούπισε τα μάτια σου.
…………………………………………...
188 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

Ο θάνατος κάτι σου παίρνει.

σε κάθε θανή κάτι σου λείπει.
Γι’αυτό μη ρωτάς για ποιόνε χτυπά η καμπάνα.64
(Someone is grieving. Is it you? . . . .
García Lorca, Abraham Lincoln, Vincent van Gogh?
Someone is crying, dry your eyes.
………………………………….
Death deprives you of something.
In every loss there’s something that you miss.
So don’t send to know for whom the bell tolls.)

Ιn “Επικαλούμαι τον Λόρκα, τον Σολζενίτσιν” 65 (I invoke Lorca,

Solzhenitsyn), Krineos invokes both Lorca and the dissident Soviet writer
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to spring life and solidarity upon a world of hypoc-
risy and urban alienation. Finally, Krineos returns to Lorca in his late poem
“Να θυμηθεί τη Γρανάδα του”66 (So that he remembers his Granada), where
the imagery of an ever-vernal, life-giving Granada serves as a promise of
immortality for the dead poet.
However, Lorca’s most significant impact in Cyprus occurs in the work
of poets of the so-called “Generation of the 1960s,” then in works by some
younger litterateurs who came to age in the 1970s. This somewhat belated
interest in Lorca—compared to his Greek and American “boom” in the 1940s
and 1950s, respectively—can be attributed to the specific historical reality of
the island, involved in a bloody anti-colonial struggle for its self-determina-
tion until the late 1950s. From then on, the longevity of neo-symbolist and
inward poetic concerns was replaced by a historically directed perspective,
connected with the country’s tormented trajectory in the second half of the
twentieth century. Theodosis Nicolaou (1930–2004), a significant voice of this
generation, places Lorca, along with T. S. Eliot and George Seferis, among
the figures that contributed to the renewal of Cypriot poetry. In Nicolaou’s
terms, Lorca is one of the poets who introduced a “dimension of reflection”
in the “systematized life” of Cypriot literary affairs.67
The poet Michalis Pashiardis (1941–) illustrates this tendency, having
dedicated two poems to Lorca for the thirtieth and fortieth anniversary of
his death. In “Μνήμη του Λόρκα” (Memory of Lorca), Pashiardis borrows
on Lorca’s lunar symbolic, invoking the Spaniard in familiar tones:

Πηγαίναμε∙ και τα βήματά σου

πήρανε ξαφνικά την πικραμένη τους ηχώ
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 189

καθώς σου θύμησα το βέβαιο∙ πως ο χρόνος

φεύγει καθώς αυτός ο δρόμος που πηγαίνουμε.
Κι όπως γυρίσαμε ύστερα κι’οι δυο
ψηλά, το φεγγάρι ήταν η ίδια ταξιδεμένη
μνήμη του φίλου Φεντερίκο Γκαρθία Λόρκα,
τριάντα ακριβώς χρόνια από το θάνατό του.68
(We were walking; then your steps
echoed, all of a sudden, their embittered tone
as I reminded you a certainty: that time
passes by, the way the road we are on.
And then, as we both turned up,
the moon was the very traveling
memory of the friend Federico García Lorca
exactly thirty years after his death.)

Although Pashiardis’ work does not lack poems that pertain to the typ-
ical leftist hagiography (dedicated to Ernesto Che Guevara, Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, or Vladimir Mayakovsky), this poem for Lorca bears an exis-
tential, rather than a social tone. His 1977 Lorca memorial, however, appears
more politicized, denouncing the censorship imposed on Lorca’s work by
the Franco regime.69
In the same vein, the poet Kypros Chrysanthis (1915–2008), who belongs
to an older generation, offers a series of translations of Lorca in 1961 for the
sake of fulfilling “a duty,” in his own terms, and contributing to the Lorca
ban overturn.70
The poetess Vera Korfioti (1940–), on the other hand, adopts an ahis-
torical perspective with regard to the Spaniard. In her poem “Το ποτάμι
του Λόρκα” (Lorca’s river), a lyrical response to Lorca’s “Baladilla de los tres
ríos”71 (Little ballad of the three rivers), Korfioti falls into a reverie of erotic,
or even existential nature, where love—like time—slips away in silence, along
with the flow of Guadalquivir:

Μουρμουρίζει ένα τραγούδι

ιστορεί
το παραμύθι της σιωπής
ιχνηλατεί
το ερωτικό ταξίδι
όσο κρατά η ροή
από την Κόρδοβα ως τη Σεβίλλη.72
190 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

(He murmurs a song

recounts
the tale of silence
trails
the erotic journey
all along with its flow
from Cordova to Seville.)

Despite a manifest interest in Lorca during the postwar period, most

probably associated with his warm welcoming in Greece at the time, the
Lorca tributes by Cypriot poets of this generation fall short of capturing the
resonance of Lorca’s work and reaching the aesthetic achievements made
by the generations of writers to come. However, unlike other poets of this
generation, Kyriacos Charalambides (1940–), one of the most important
figures of Modern Greek poetry, offers a wide range of reponses to Lorca
in his most recent work—from the 2000s onwards—and will therefore be
examined later in this study.

Cold-War Lorcas: From Cold-War America to the Greek Junta

and the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus

The responses to Lorca by younger poets Doros Loizou (1944–1974) and

Andriana Ierodiakonou (1952–), who spent a part of their lives in the
United States, are of particular interest, for they resonate with the realities
of Cold-War America and its mid-century avant-garde. This allows us a
direct comparison of their poems with the way varying poetic schools in
the post-war United States embraced Lorca and his work, in their quest for
“cultural alternatives to the ideology of the McCarthy era.”73
Revolutionary poet Doros Loizou revives Lorca in a wider internation-
alist and anti-imperialist framework. During the Colonels’ junta in Greece,
Loizou engaged in the anti-dictatorial movement, especially in New York and
Boston, where he completed his studies.74 During these formative years in the
United States, Loizou professed an idealist response to global issues—and even
addressed, from his position as president of his college’s student body, a letter
of protest to President Nixon over the Vietnam bombings. He further engaged
in translating revolutionary poetry, with a particular preference for Spanish and
Latin American writers, such as Rafael Alberti, Nicanor Parra, Vicente Huidobro,
Nicolás Guillén, and Salvador Novo. Interestingly, “Romance de Federico García
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 191

Lorca” (Ballad of Federico García Lorca) by Guatemalan poet Luis Cardoza y

Aragón figures among these translations.75 The selective and ideological nature
of Loizou’s translating work attests to a particular interest in the figure of Lorca,
which becomes more apparent, as we shall see, in his own poetry.
Given these elements, one could suggest that Loizou’s anguished vision
of New York and Lorca’s Poet in New York move beyond a sole thematic
coincidence.76 Loizou’s persistent return to the theme of the poets’ assassi-
nation—especially in his two Lorca memorials—appears to be specifically
indebted to Lorca’s New York poem “Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos” (OC
449-51; Fable and Round of the Three Friends). In “This wind you knew,”77
Loizou invokes the Spaniard’s powerful concept of the duende, most likely
informed by the popularity of Lorca’s duende lecture among American poets
at the time.78 Most importantly, Loizou’s poem “They are coming again”
echoes with “Lines to Garcia Lorca” by the Negro American poet LeRoi
Jones (Amiri Baraka) in strikingly similar terms; in Loizou:

Έρχονται πάλι.
Έρχονται, Φεντερίκο.
………………………
Έρχονται να σε ξανασκοτώσουν,
Φεντερίκο.
………..…
Κι ύστερα θα πουν
ότι σε σκότωσαν κατά λάθος,
πως ήταν ατύχημα, τυχαίο περιστατικό.
Άβε Μαρία, άβε Μαρία
προσευχήσου για μας.
Όλους εμάς τους αθώους Φεντερίκους
Εμάς που μας σκοτώνουν
τυχαία, κατά λάθος.79
(They are coming again.
They are coming, Federico.
……………………………
They are coming to kill you again,
Federico.
……..…
And then they will say
that they killed you by mistake,
that it was an accident, a random incident.
192 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

Ave Maria, Αve Maria,

pray for us.
For all of us innocent Federicos
For us whom they are killing
by fortune, by mistake.)

And in Baraka:

Send soldiers to kill you again, Garcia.

Send them to quell my escape.
……………………………….
You are dying again, Garcia.
………………………….…
Hail Mary,
Holy mother,
Pray for me.80

Baraka’s poem for Lorca, first published in 1958 in Yungen, then republished
by Langston Hughes in his 1964 anthology for Negro American writers,
was composed when Baraka had joined the poets of the Beatnik movement,
most of whom professed a vivid interest in Lorca. Although far from Baraka’s
later black nationalism, Lorca resonates here with the poet’s increasing
yearnings for black identity, much owed to Lorca’s own section “Los negros”
(The Blacks) from Poeta en Nueva York. Both in Baraka and Loizou, Lorca
appears as a projection of the poetic ego, whose death is repeatedly enacted
and actualized, as if to highlight its obstinate fatality. Loizou seems to sug-
gest, however, more generic disapproval of the censorship inflicted upon the
poets’ work—which brings him closer to Nicos Engonopoulos’ foremost
poem about Lorca, “Νέα περί του θανάτου του Ισπανού ποιητού Φεντερίκο
Γκαρθία Λόρκα στις 19 Αυγούστου του 1936 μέσα στο χαντάκι του Καμίνο
ντε λα φουέντε” (News on the death of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca
on the 19th of August 1936 in the ditch of Camino de la Fuente),81 which
engages with the subject matter in a highly ironic temper.
Upon his return to Cyprus, Loizou took an active part in the polit-
ical development of his homeland. The acute awareness of death Loizou
shares with Lorca acquires highly prophetic or even tragic dimensions, for
the Cypriot “Federico” was soon to be shot and killed in the assassination
attempt against the leader of the Social Democratic Movement EDEK,
Vassos Lyssaridis, during the bloody period that followed the coup d’état
and the Turkish military invasion of Cyprus, in 1974. The parallels are,
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 193

again, astounding: both Lorca and Loizou were promising voices, violently
silenced in their prime; they both died at the outset of the civil clash of
their countries; the culprits of their assassination were never identified or
set on trial; they both foreshadowed their own death; and they both died in
August.
Cosmopolitan poetess Andriana Ierodiakonou also evokes Lorca in one
of her poems, written during her stay in Berkeley, California (1978–1980).
While in the United States, Ierodiakonou collaborated with prominent surre-
alist writer Nanos Valaoritis—who was close to such Beat icons as Burroughs
and Ginsberg—on vanguardist journals. Like Loizou, Ierodiakonou enters
in dialogue with poets from Spanish-speaking countries, who met with an
explosion of interest in the 1970s United States within the dynamics of the
Cold War. Her poem “Σωτηρία” (Salvation) articulates a rather existential
concern, where Lorca acquires, again, a “soteriological” and thus mythical
dimension. Before the presentiment of death, Ierodiakonou recalls a (some-
what archaic) form of collegiality, which Lorca comes to embody alongside
other (social) poets, such as Neruda, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and César Vallejo:

Έρχεται ο Λόρκα με αγκάλες ανοιχτές

και τον ήλιο του θανάτου ανάμεσα στα δόντια
έρχεται ο Βαγιέχο με τα μαύρα μάτια κατάκλειστα
…………………………………..…………………
ο Χίμενεθ με το τριανταφυλλί χαμόγελο
έρχεται ο Νερούντα επικεφαλής
σε μεγάλη παρέλαση ανθρώπων και ιγκουάνας.
Φίλοι μην αφήκετε
να μου δέσουν σε μαύρο μαντήλι τα πνευμόνια
..…………………………………………………
να περάσω ακόμα ένα τέτοιο χειμώνα.82
(There comes Lorca with open arms
and the sun of death between his teeth.
There comes Vallejo with his black eyes, wide-shut,
………………………………………………..……..
Jiménez with his rosy smile.
There comes Neruda, leading
a big parade of men and iguanas.
Friends, don’t let them tie my lungs in a black handkerchief
…………………………………………..…………….……
spare me another winter.)
194 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

Τhe events of 1974 cast a shadow across the Cypriot literary affairs, having
set both the mood and the theme of a great number of writers to date. Fivos
Stavridis (1938–2012) engages with Lorca’s “Despedida” (OC 364; Farewell)
in his poem “Το μπαλκόνι” (Τhe balcony) from his collection Απομυθοποίηση
(Demythification)—which otherwise deals with the thematics of displace-
ment and the tragic fate of the island. The only surviving “myth” in this
dreadful picture is García Lorca, whose “open balcony” represents an affir-
mative call for life:

Φεντερίκο
σαράντα χρόνια είναι πολλά για το παιγνίδι μες
στη γη,
βγες στο μπαλκόνι∙ είναι ανοιχτό και περιμένει.83
(Federico,
forty years is too much for the game in
the earth.
Come out on the balcony; it is open and is waiting.)

Interestingly, Stavridis’ epigraph from Lorca’s “Despedida” (“αν πεθάνω,

άσε το μπαλκόνι ανοιχτό”84) appears in a translation by the lyricist Lefteris
Papadopoulos, as set into music by Yiannis Glezos for his album 12 Songs for
García Lorca (1969). Released amid the dictatorship, this record was inter-
preted by the renowned singer Yiannis Poulopoulos and became extremely
popular at the time, hence Stavridis’ familiarity with the poem.
It is worth noting that, apart from Glezos, some of the greatest Greek
composers set Lorca’s work to music, including Manos Hadjidakis, Mikis
Theodorakis, Stavros Xarhacos, Thanos Mikroutsicos, Christos Leontis,
Nicos Mamagakis, or even the Cypriot Manos Loizos, who made his
record debut in 1962 with Lorca’s “Anda jaleo” (OC 825; Let’s have a good
time), in an adaptation by the eminent Greek poet Nicos Gatsos. Following
Theodorakis’ musical setting of Lorca’s Romancero gitano, censored by the
Colonels, Lorca would become widely popular among networks of resistance
and one of the most prominent figures of the Greek political song.85 A ban
on works by other leftist composers, such as Glezos and Loizos, was about
to follow. Theodorakis would eventually record Romancero gitano, along with
Neruda’s Canto general in Paris. Performed before large audiences abroad in
favor of the restoration of democracy in Greece, these albums would only
be released in Greece after the fall of the Colonels.
Informed by the same political context, poet George Moleskis (1946–)
titles one of his poems “Άσε το παράθυρο ανοιχτό” (Leave the window open),
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 195

which relates intertextually both to Lorca’s “Despedida” and “Fábula y rueda

de los tres amigos.” Interestingly, the poet’s symbolic death acquires here
a class-sensitive perspective, but also alludes to the anti-communist, para-
military organization EOKA-B, which staged the 1974 Cyprus coup—under
the auspices of the military junta of Athens and the policy of containment
pursued by the United States during the Cold War—leading to the catastro-
phes of the Turkish invasion and enforced partition of the island:

Κι ας μείνει το παράθυρο ανοιχτό για . . . .

περαστικούς, αγωνιστές,
νεκρούς,
παιδιά, εργάτες. Ας μείνει έτσι ανοιχτό σαν την
καρδιά μας
να κοιτάζει κατάματα τους φονιάδες.
……………………………..………..
Κι όταν θα πέσω . . . .
. . . . σκούπισε το αίμα από το πεζοδρόμιο
να μην το βρούνε και το μολέψουν
γράφοντας μ’αυτό
ένα σύνθημα προδοτικό στον τοίχο.86
(Let the window stay open for . . . .
the passers-by, the fighters,
the dead,
the children, the workers. Leave it open like
our hearts
to look into the eyes of the killers.
………………………………...…
And when I will fall. . . .
. . . . sweep up the blood from the pavement
lest they find it and defile it,
by using it to write
a treasonous slogan on the wall.)

Poetess Andry Christofidou-Antoniadou revives Lorca in a postinvasional

climate as well, where death as violence-tyranny—rather than as a natural
causality—lingers to remind of its dark certainty:

Στ’αλήθεια Φεδερίκο,
..................................
γιατί δεν τα ’πες
196 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

εκείνα τα τσιγγάνικα ξόρκια

για να διώξεις τους φασίστες
της χώρας σου,
τους καταχτητές της δικής μου;
Η βία δεν κατέχει
από ποίηση και φεγγάρια.87
(Indeed, Federico,
.............................
why didn’t you cast those gypsy spells
to overthrow the fascists of your country,
the oppressors of my own?
Violence does not grasp
poetry and moons.)

Christofidou-Antoniadou professed a lifelong interest in Lorca. Aside from

her tribute “O φίλος μου Φεδερίκο”88 (My Friend Federico), referenced in this
essay’s epigraph, she has offered a book-length study on Lorca and further col-
laborated with the Cyprus Theatre Organization on a staging of Yerma, in 1998.
The poetic revival of Lorca’s death and the writer’s impressive fortune
among Greek art-popular composers during the Cold War, especially in the years
of the Junta, acquired a predominant political dimension to convey Spanish-
Greek comparisons between Franco and the Colonels’ dictatorships, beyond
partisan or merely leftist beliefs. Within the same context, Lorca was particularly
attractive to poets from Cyprus seeking to denounce Cold-War imperialism
and the Greek military junta, which played a pivotal role in developments in
Cyprus that triggered the Turkish invasion and occupation of the island.

Beyond the Political: Cypriot Lorcas in the Twenty-First Century

Far from expressing uncritical—and rather impressionistic—admiration,

twenty-first-century Cypriot writers lay the foundations for a more substan-
tial relationship to the Spanish writer. Lorca’s duende acquires an interesting
feminist edge in Elena Toumazi’s award-winning collection Έρχου (Come)
(2011). Toumazi, alias Rebelina (The Rebel), is a noted figure in contemporary
Cypriot literature for being the first and most fervent exponent of écriture
féminine since her early involvement in the second wave of the feminist
movement until today. With respect to Lorca’s passionate, “dark song,” which
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 197

transforms death into a vital impulse toward the Other, Toumazi attempts to
define a new, female bodily language, beyond the rule of the Father’s Name:

Άκου
To σώμα ανεβαίνει
Φέγγοντας
Εν τω μέσω της νυκτός
Ασημίζει τα νερά Γυμνή
………………..……….
Ανατέλλει η φωνή του
Ντουέντε
Στο διάφωτο89
(Listen
The body
ascends shining
In the midst of the night
It silvers the waters Naked90
……………………………
Its voice rises
Duende
Brightly lit)

In reclaiming the female body and sexuality, the excerpt above is further
reminiscent of a rather materialized/bodily version of Solomos’ foremost
figure of Feggarontymeni (a girl lit by the moon), which otherwise, through-
out Greek poetry, appears to represent archetypal ideas and values such as
liberty and the homeland.
A gendered approach to Lorca is offered by younger prose-writer
Nasia Dionysiou (b. 1979) as well. Dionysiou, who was recently awarded the
national prize for literature for her short-story collection Περιττή ομορφιά
(Superfluous beauty) (2017) refers to Lorca’s foremost “dark root of a cry”
from Blood Wedding (III. 2) to argue for a feminine (qua plural) writing and
offer her own definition of literature as a means to approach the depths of
existence as ultimately open and diverse.91
Lorca’s most recent appearance in Cypriot poetry in Stella Voskaridou’s (b.
1981) surrealist “Λαίμαργα” (Gluttonously) (2019) is associated with a voracious
lust for language, in search for sounds in their utmost materiality—which is
most often maternally (i.e., pre-Oedipally) connoted in Voskaridou’s work, in
quest of the source of biological drives and rhythm. With reference to the phrase
198 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

“το έλκος του Λόρκα”92 (Lorca’s [peptic] ulcer), the Spaniard enters into the
paradigmatic axis of a poetic-qua-(dys)peptic disease, related to concepts such
as wound, seclusion, insatiate hunger/desire, and ultimately trauma and death.
However, of all the poets from Cyprus who took inspiration from Lorca,
it is Kyriacos Charalambides who had the deepest and broadest response to
the work of the Spaniard. Charmed by Lorca’s fresh modernism from his
early years as a student in Athens, Charalambides offers a pastiche of Lorca’s
“Canción de jinete” (OC 313; Horseman’s Song) in his very first collection,
Πρώτη πηγή (First source) (1961), to addresses a deep poetic sorrow—
enhanced by Lorca’s melismatic “¡Ay!,”—before the primacy of the inevitable:

Kόρντοβα μακρινή κι αγαπημένη

…………………………………..
κι ο Λόρκα με φεγγάρι πάει να πάρει
λίγο κομμάτι από την Κόρντοβα.
Μα ο μαύρος θάνατος είναι στεγνός κι αφέγγαρος.
κι ο Λόρκα πώς θα ζήσει δίχως άστρα;
Άι και δε φτάσαμε στην Κόρντοβα.
Άι και μας πήρε η μέρα.93
(Cordova, beloved and alone.
………………………………
And Lorca with moon sets out to take
a piece of Cordova.
But black death is dry and has no moon;
and Lorca, how is he to live without stars?
Ay! that we didn’t reach Cordova.
Ay! that the day has gone.)

However, Charalambides would return to Lorca in his later work, in the early
2000s, and would not abandon him ever since. In 2001, the poet received
an honorary invitation by well-respected Greek actresses Mary Vidali and
Katerina Helmi, who appeared in memorable movies as well as in theatre,
to translate Lorca’s songs from La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of
Bernarda Alba) for a Greek staging, directed by Vidali, featuring Helmi
in the role of Bernarda. Translated directly from Spanish, Charalambides’
translations remain remarkably faithful to the original text, amending a
certain arbitrariness of prior translations by Nicos Gatsos, one of the most
accomplished translators of Lorca in Greek. Also, Charalambides composed
another three poems for the occasion, one of which served as a genuine
closing to the performance. Αbundant in motifs from Lorca’s own rural
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 199

setting (olive, grain, dawn, gallop, etc.), this poem offers a horseback picture
of Lorca, who merges with the play’s notorious character, Pepe el Romano,
in a redemptive—quasi Christic—perspective.94 Charalambides’ poems and
translations of Lorca were set to music especially for this production by the
well-known composer Notis Mavroudis, enriching the Spaniard’s phenom-
enal fortune among the most important Greek composers of the twentieth
century. In this respect, it should be noted that Charalambides’ wonderful
translation of Lorca’s “Los segadores” (The reapers) for the stage play was
later interpreted by the famous actress and singer Zoe Fytousi, who appeared
in many Greek movies and stage plays and performed songs by many great
Greek composers, such as Hadjidakis and Theodorakis.95
A second poem about Lorca, intended to be read as an introduction to
the staging, was not finally included. However, it provides a good sense of
Charalambides’ poetics and testifies to osmosis with Lorca’s work. Following
Lorca’s aestheticization of the traditional ballad, Charalambides offers here
a subtle stylization of the Greek demotic song through the use of traditional
verse, formulaic expressions, and relevant devices. This return to the folk
element is not a mere stylistic exercise, for it carries, both in Lorca and
Charalambides, a dense emotional cargo, pointing to the quest of a deeper
or primary earthly transcendence, which derives directly from nature, its
purity, and—most importantly—its rootedness in destiny and necessity. This
comes through strongly in Charalambides’ poem, which opens character-
istically with a mention of Ainadamar, the legendary “Fountain of Tears”
of the Moorish—a site near which Lorca was to be executed in 1936. As in
Antonio Machado’s “The crime was in Granada,” the source is endowed
with a human voice to express its everlasting grief for Lorca’s death.
Charalambides returns to Lorca in his poem “Σιμά στη Γρανάδα
(Καλοκαίρι του 1936)” (Near Granada (Summer of 1936)), where Lorca and
Federico, History and Mythos—the Profane and the Sacred—walk side by
side in a unique, mystic encounter:

Μες στα βαθιά σαλόνια ο θάνατός του

ποθεί να κοιμηθεί, μα δε βολεί—τα βόλια
χύνουν χυμό ροδιού κι ο μαύρος κύκνος
μεθά τη θάλασσα με τα φτερά του.
Κι είπε στο Λόρκα ο Φεδερίκο: «Φίλε,
μη σκιάζεσαι κι εγώ θα σε σκεπάσω.»96
(In the large salons, his death
longs for sleep; in vain—the bullets
pour pomegranate juice and the black swan
200 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

fuddles the sea with its feathers.

And Lorca said to Federico: “Friend,
fear not, and I will cover you up.”)

Lorca further provides stimulation for metapoetic reflection in Charalambides’

collection Ίμερος (Himeros) (2012), highly suggestive of passion and desire.
His poem “In the language of weaving” represents archetypal beauty in the
form of Helen, identified with Lorca’s semiparalyzed, “marble-hearted”
(cf. “medio-corazón de mármol”; OC 1099) Muse from Teoría y juego del
duende (Theory and Play of the Duende):

Στη γλώσσα της υφαντικής, η Ελένη δεν σημαίνει

παρά του παλατιού την εσωτέρα οδύνη
……………………..………………….
Πίσω απ’τα τείχη της δικιάς της Τροίας
σκορπώντας ολοαίματα μετάξια
συντετριμμένης θλίψεως.
Με τη μισή καρδιά της από μάρμαρο
—κατά του Λόρκα τη γραφή—και με λιωμένη
ψυχή στ’απανωφρύδι του φιδιού.97
(In the language of weaving,
Helen means nothing but the suffering
of the palace within.
……………..……..
Behind the walls of her own Troy
scattering blood-soaked silks
of devastating grief.
Her heart half marble
—in Lorca’s writing—and with a melted soul
on the snake’s upper brow.)

On the fragile boundary of eros and thanatos, Helen of Troy, like Philomela—
or like a Moira—“weaves” the story of her sorrows, pointing at a possibility of
absence—including one’s own absence—, conveying a tragic sense of life verg-
ing toward beauty, quite similar to the one addressed by Lorca in his aesthetics
of the duende. For duende is both passion and pathos, the very performance of
one’s own destiny, endowed with the dramatic intensity of its own menace.
Charalambides has arguably offered one of the most accomplished, holistic,
and productive responses to Lorca in Modern Greek poetry in its entirety.
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 201

Conclusion: “Is Lorca of our time?”

From 1937 to 2019, a number of Cypriot men and women of letters—at

different times and under entirely different historical circumstances—have
chanted F.G. Lorca throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
A total of eighteen writers and intellectuals, twenty-seven poems, republi-
can, Marxist, anti-colonial, nationalist, postwar, Cold-War, anti-dictatorial,
orphic, erotic, universal, existential, or even feminist Lorcas form an impressive
corpus that adds significantly to Lorca’s phenomenal legacy in the Hellenic
world. Although uneven in depth and quality, these poems testify to Lorca’s
diachrony and iconic status in world literary history and the Greek cultural
sphere in particular. Lorca’s literary success in Cyprus, a peripheral—and rather
misrecognized—area of the wider Hellenism attests to the Spaniard’s impor-
tance and representativeness across the world. Apart from Arthur Rimbaud,
who sojourned twice on the island, no other foreign writer has been so widely
mentioned in Cypriot poetry. The interest in Lorca in the Greek world, more
generally, is unequaled compared to any other Spanish writer—with the
possible exception of Cervantes, who never acquired, however, the status of
a “literary myth” as previously discussed. Also, most of the Greek poets who
professed an interest in Lorca—more openly identified with Anglo-Saxon and
French modernist models—had a very limited interest in Spanish language and
literature. These observations suggest that the dynamic of Lorca’s reception
might be different from that of other writers, precisely because his death—in
its various permutations—became the defining act in assessing both his life
and work, at least at the early stages of his reception. Lorca as a figure of death
survives up to our days in poems that are not necessarily political or convey
existential and metapoetic concerns (e.g., Charalambides and Voskaridou).
The above attest to Lorca’s impact as a symbol in a cross-cultural
perspective, as well as to his enduring presence in a largely leftist cultural
product. This further explains the Cypriots’ early circumstantial response
to his work, as diffused and consolidated through various ideological chan-
nels. However, Lorca appears to be most often mentioned than read. The
majority of the poems examined remain shallow, clichéd, selective, or have
little to do with Lorca’s own work. While Lorca’s reception in Greece bears
the traceable mark of some of the canonical proponents of a Mediterranean
modernist aesthetic, “the Cypriot Lorca,” from the post-war period and
beyond, occupies a sphere which remains predominantly political and
historicized, attached to the island’s particular experience of colonialism,
national frustration, Cold-War politics, and Turkish invasion and occupation.
202 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

Nevertheless, the response to Lorca by younger generations of poets from

the 1970s onwards appears to be more sophisticated and aestheticized. Also,
several female writers from Cyprus turn increasingly to Lorca, who other-
wise stands at the center of a male canonical tradition in Greece, as well as
in Spain and the Americas. Interestingly, these female voices outnumber
their male counterparts over the last decades and bring Lorca close to the
sphere of the intimate, the “feminine” (or the feminist) and the maternal—
without any reference, however, to Lorca’s gender-sensitive perspective as
a poet and a playwright, which could otherwise fuel discussions of feminist
politics and poetics.
What is it then, that still fascinates about Lorca? “Is Lorca of our
time?”98 to quote American poet Kenneth Koch? “Who is Lorca?,” asks, in
turn, Kyriacos Charalambides, “is he the one whom they killed or the one
that survives after his death?”99 It seems impossible—or even transcenden-
tal—to argue for a quintessential “Lorca” or make any claims about what
an adequate aesthetic response to his work might be. Lorca–as a figure–has
his own histories of reception which extend our knowledge of his capacity
to call forth new responses and reveal impressive resonances abroad that
remain unfamiliar to the author’s compatriots. As younger generations and
individual authors distance themselves from the reading communities of
which they are part—most often anchored in stereotypical Lorca-image
repertoires—Lorca’s stature and wide output as a writer could, perhaps,
come into full and unobscured view.

demetra demetriou earned a BA in Greek Philology from the University

of Athens and both an MPhil (summa cum laude) and a PhD (summa cum
laude) in Comparative Literature from Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV).
She received scholarships for excellence by the Cyprus State Scholarship
Foundation (IKY) and the A.G. Leventis Foundation and has been awarded
grants by the University of Bristol and the Norman University Pole. She
is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Nicosia (Department
of Education) and at the Open University of Cyprus. She is also a senior
fellow at the Cyprus Center for European and International Affairs
(CCEIA), University of Nicosia. She has also taught at the University of
Cyprus (Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies; Department
of French and European Studies). She is coeditor of the volumes Desire
of Language: The Poetry of Kyriacos Charalambides [in Greek] (Athens:
Herodotus; forthcoming) and Woman in the Text [in Greek] (Nicosia:
Akti, 2019). She has widely published on Greek literature in comparativist,
peer-reviewed contributions.
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 203

Notes
1. According to K.G. Kassinis’ survey, Lorca is the most translated Spanish writer in Greek,
in “Η ελληνική ταυτότητα της ισπανικής λογοτεχνίας” [The Greek identity of Spanish litera-
ture], in Πρακτικά Δʹ Ευρωπαϊκού Συνεδρίου Νεοελληνικών Σπουδών, Γρανάδα, 9-12 Σεπτεμβρίου
2010 [Proceedings of the 4th European Congress of Modern Greek Studies, Granada, 9-12 Sept.
2010], ed. Constantinos A. Dimadis (Athens: European Society of Modern Greek Studies, 2011),
2: 150. For Lorca’s reception in Greek poetry, see Anna Rosenberg, “As Handsome as a Greek:
The Reception and Creative Appropriation of Federico Garcia Lorca in Modern Greek Poetry
(1933-1986)” (PhD diss., King’s College London, 2007); Anna Rosenberg, “The Greek Lorca:
Translation, Homage, Image,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 91, no. 1 (2014): 33–51. For Lorca’s theat-
rical reception, see Virginia López Recio, La recepción de Federico García Lorca en Grecia: El caso de
Bodas de Sangre [The reception of Federico García Lorca in Greece: The case of Blood Wedding]
(Granada: Centro de Estudios Bizantinos, Neogriegos y Chipriotas, 2008). For Lorca’s reception
in Cypriot poetry, see Demetra Demetriou, “Στον δρόμο για την Κόρδοβα: Ο μύθος του Federico
García Lorca στην κυπριακή ποίηση” [On the way to Cordova: The myth of F.G. Lorca in Cypriot
poetry], in Πρακτικά Συνεδρίου Ο Ισπανικός Εμφύλιος: Κύπρος, Ελλάδα και Ευρώπη [Proceedings of
the Conference The Spanish Civil War: Cyprus, Greece, and Europe] (Nicosia: The Prometheus
Research Institute, 2015), 91–102. For Lorca’s specific reception by major Greek poet George Seferis,
see Demetra Demetriou, “Με την Ισπανία στην καρδιά: Γιώργος Σεφέρης-Federico García Lorca”
[Spain in My Heart: George Seferis-Federico García Lorca], Erytheia, no. 40 (2019): 337–60.
2. Xenophon Kokolis, “Lorca, 60 χρόνια από το θάνατό του: H Λορκομανία των Ελλήνων”
[Lorca, 60 years after his death: The Lorcomania of the Greeks], Tram 1, no. 36 (1996): 91.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
3. Marius-François Guyard, La Littérature comparée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1951), 54.
4. See Pierre Brunel, Claude Pichois and André Michel Rousseau, Qu’est-ce que la lit-
térature comparée (1983; Paris: Armand Colin, 2006), 126–7; Pierre Brunel, “Introduction,” in
Dictionnaire des mythes littéraires, ed. Pierre Brunel (1988; Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2003),
12–14. Philippe Sellier offers a more detailed myth-critical typology, with reference to glorious
historical figures transferred into the realm of myth as “politico-heroic,” in his “Qu’est-ce qu’un
mythe littéraire?,” Littérature, no. 55 (1984), 112–26.
5. See Antony Beevor, La guerra civil española [The Spanish Civil War], trans. Gonzalo
Pontón Diseño (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005), 150–51; Gabriele Ranzato, Ο ισπανικός εμφύλιος
πόλεμος [The Spanish Civil War], trans. Ioannis Nakos (Athens: Kedros, 2006), 27.
6. Aldo Garosci, Los intelectuales y la guerra de España [Intellectuals and the Spanish War]
(Madrid: Júcar, 1981), 31.
7. See Cary Nelson, “1936, Madrid: The Heart of the World,” in The Edimburg Companion to
Twentieth Century Literatures in English, ed. Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson (Edimburg:
Edimburg University Press, 2006), 92.
8. See Alfonso Sánchez Rodríguez, Un temblor de olas rojas: Poesía y compromiso político en
la España de 1936 [An earthquake of red waves: Poetry and political commitment in Spain of
1936] (Seville: Renacimiento, 2014), 128–9.
9. See Federico García Lorca, Poems, trans. Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili, intro. R.M.
Nadal (London: The Dolphin, 1939).
10. Garosci, Los intelectuales, 31.
11. Ibid., 32. As Lorca’s biographer, Ian Gibson, further argues, unlike most of his fellow
poets and despite his liberal sympathies, Lorca “never joined a political party and had little
interest in the mechanics of politics,” in his The Assassination of Federico García Lorca (London:
W. H. Allen, 1979), 51.
12. Fernando Sorrentino, Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Clark M. Zlotchew
(Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2010), 104.
13. Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1969), 93.
204 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

14. Manolis Anagnostakis, “Και πάλι για τον υπερρεαλισμό” [Again on Surrealism], Nea
Laïki Foni 3 (October 1946): 17.
15. Manolis Anagnostakis, “Ο Ραφαέλ Αλμπέρτι στην Ισπανία ύστερα από 40 χρόνια εξορία”
[Rafael Alberti in Spain after 40 years of exile], Lexi 25, no. 186 (2005): 423–4.
16. See Antonio García Guzmán. “Το φαινόμενο Λόρκα εν Eλλάδι (Η ‘λορκομανία των
Ελλήνων’)” [The Lorca phenomenon in Greece (The “Lorcomania” of the Greeks)], Diavazo,
no. 466 (September 2006): 122–4.
17. Ibid., 124.
18. Giorgos Seferis, “Ερωτόκριτος” (Erotocritos), in Δοκιμές [Essays] (Athens: Ikaros, 1974), 1: 315.
19. Kokolis, “Lorca, 60 χρόνια,” 91.
20. Dimitris Filippis, “Η πρόσληψη και η διάδοση του έργου του στην Ελλάδα” [The reception
and diffusion of his work in Greece], Diavazo, no. 466 (September 2016): 117.
21. Garosci, Los intelectuales, 34.
22. Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, trans. Richard Howard (London: Creation Books,
1998), 67.
23. Qtd. in Gabriele Ranzato, El eclipse de la democracia: la Guerra Civil española y sus orígenes,
1931-1939 [The eclipse of democracy: The Spanish Civil War and its origins] (Madrid: Siglo,
2006), 143.
24. Qtd. in Gibson, Assassination, 186.
25. Qtd. in Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 344.
26. Qtd. in Gibson, Assassination, 190–91.
27. See Thanassis Sfikas, Η Ελλάδα και ο Ισπανικός Εμφύλιος Πόλεμος: Ιδεολογία, οικονομία,
διπλωματία [Greece and the Spanish Civil War: Ideology, economy, diplomacy] (Athens:
Stachy, 2000), 72.
28. Ibid., 223–4.
29. Nicos Kazantzakis, “Φρειδερίκος Γκαρθία Λόρκα. Ο Ισπανός ποιητής που σκοτώθηκε”
[Federico García Lorca. The Spanish poet who was killed], Kathimerini (11 January 1937); sec.
“H φιλολογική σελίς”: 3.
30. See Paul Strongos, Spanish Thermopylae: Cypriot Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War
(Barcelona: Warren & Pell, 2009), 28–31.
31. See Heinz A. Richter, A Concise History of Modern Cyprus: 1878-2009 (Mainz/Ruhpolding:
Franz Philipp Rutzen, 2010), 32–4.
32. Strongos, Spanish Thermopylae, 28.
33. Ibid., 3.
34. Ibid., 27–34.
35. Bill Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty: Spain 1936-1939 (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1982), 35.
36. Cf. Dionysios Solomos’ Ύμνος εις την Ελευθερίαν (Hymn to Liberty) (1823). The first two
stanzas of the poem, set to music by Nicolaos Mantzaros, became the Greek national anthem.
37. Cf. Solomos’ epigram “Η καταστροφή των Ψαρών” (Τhe destruction of Psara) (1825).
38. The third siege of Missolonghi (1825-26), a major event of the Greek War of Independence,
remains a point of reference for the Greek literary memory, starting with Solomos’ foremost
Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι (The Free Besieged) (1833-1849).
39. “The Dance of Zalongo” refers to the mass suicide of the Greek women of Souli, who threw
themselves off the cliff of Zalongo to avoid their eventual capture and enslavement by the Ottomans.
40. Thodosis Pierides, Ξέρουμε κ’εμείς να τραγουδούμε [We also know how to sing] (Cairo:
n.pub., 1937), 57.
41. Cf. Dionysios Solomos’ foremost verse from O Πόρφυρας [The Shark], in Άπαντα
[Complete Works], ed. Linos Politis (Athens: Ikaros, 1986), 1:254: “Ανοιχτά πάντα κι’ άγρυπνα
τα μάτια της ψυχής μου” [Always open and vigilant the eyes of my soul]; and a variation in
Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι [The Free Besieged]: “Πάντ’ανοιχτά, πάντ’άγρυπνα, τα μάτια της
ψυχής μου” [Always open, always vigilant, the eyes of my soul] (1:234).
42. Cf. Nicos Kazantzakis, “Οι Ελεύτεροι Πολιορκημένοι του Αλκάθαρ” [The Free
Besieged of Alcázar], in Ταξιδεύοντας: Ισπανία [Travelling: Spain] (Athens: Helen Kazantzaki
 THE MY TH OF LORCA 205

Publications, n.d.). Ιn this chapter, Kazantzakis faithfully reproduces the accounts of the siege
of the Alcázar as diffused by the Nationalist propaganda apparatus. Interestingly, Kazantzakis
compares Toledo with Missolonghi and, like Solomos, sees in the defenders of the city the
supreme manifestation of human freedom.
43. See in particular, sec.VII from Thodosis Pierides, Κυπριακή Συμφωνία [Cypriot
Symphony], ([Bucharest]: Political and Literary Publications, 1956); compared with Pablo
Neruda, “Explico algunas cosas” [I explain a few things], in Εspaña en el corazón [Spain in my
heart] (Santiago: Ercilla, 1937).
44. Stratis Tsirkas, “Ο όρκος των ποιητών στον Φεντερίκο Γκαρθία Λόρκα” [Τhe Poets’ Oath
to Federico García Lorca], Epitheorisi Technis 15, no. 89 (May 1962): 568–70.
45. Ibid., 568.
46. Stratis Tsirkas, Το λυρικό ταξίδι [The lyrical journey] (Alexandria: n.pub., 1938), n.pag.
47. See Rosenberg, “The Greek Lorca,” 36.
48. See Tefkros Anthias, “‘To λυρικό ταξίδι’ του Στρατή Τσίρκα” [Stratis Tsirkas’ “The lyrical
journey”], Eleftheria (25 January 1939): 1–2.
49. Nicos Nicolaides, “Federico Garcia Lorca,” Epitheorisi Technis 2, no. 9 (September 1955):
182.
50. See Tsirkas’ annotation in Nicolaides, “Federico,” 182.
51. Κατάλοιπα από το αρχείο του Νίκου Νικολαΐδη [Remainders from Nicos Nicolaides’ archive],
ed. Lefteris Papaleontiou (Nicosia: En Tipis, 2003), 310.
52. Nicolaides, “Federico,” 182.
53. Rosenberg, “The Greek Lorca,” 41–5.
54. Mario Vitti, H “Γενιά του Tριάντα”: Ιδεολογία και μορφή [The “Generation of the Thirties”:
Ideology and Form] (Athens: Ermis, 2006), 84.
55. Antonis Indianos (1899-1968), a lawyer, critic, translator, and poet himself, established his
reputation in literary circles in Athens in the 1920s. Apart from his pioneering translations of
modernist literature, he became most known for his contribution to the study of the life and
work of Ionian School poet, Andreas Kalvos.
56. Antonis Indianos, “Federico García Lorca,” Κypriaka Grammata 4, no. 5 (1939): 281–85.
57. Rosenberg, “The Greek Lorca,” 43.
58. I follow Dora Menti’s documentation, according to which the first Lorca translation to
follow Kazantzakis’ ones was published in 1940, in “Ο διάλογος των ελλήνων μεταπολεμικών
ποιητών με τον F.G. Lorca” [Τhe dialogue between Greek post-war poets with F.G. Lorca],
Porfyras, no. 55 (October–December 1990): 59.
59. See above, note 9.
60. Jonathan Mayhew, Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch (Chicago/London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 179.
61. Nadal, introduction to Poems, by García Lorca, xiv.
62. Indianos, “Federico García Lorca,” 283.
63. Nadal, introduction to Poems, by García Lorca, xiv.
64. Pavlos Krineos, Το χρυσό δισκοπότηρο [The golden chalice] (Athens: To Elliniko Vivlio,
1972), 70–71.
65. Pavlos Krineos, Το μανουάλι με τα 63 κεριά [The 63-candle candelabrum] (Athens:
n. pub., 1974), 58–9.
66. Pavlos Krineos, Το σταυρωμένο λιθόστρωτο [Τhe crossed stone pavement] (Athens:
n. pub., 1980), 68.
67. Theodosis Nicolaou, “Η ποίηση του Παντελή Μηχανικού” [The poetry of Pantelis
Michanicos], in Φιλολογικά και κριτικά κείμενα [Philological and critical texts], ed. Lefteris
Papaleontiou (Athens: Gavrielides, 2008), 426–7.
68. Michalis Pashiardis, Ο δρόμος της ποίησης [Τhe road of poetry] (Nicosia: n.pub., 1970), 1: 157.
69. Michalis Pashiardis, “Federico García Lorca,” in Η Ευρώπη στην κυπριακή ποίηση [Europe
in Cypriot poetry], ed. Mona Savvidou-Theodoulou (Nicosia: Armida, 2006), 120.
70. See Kypros Chrysanthis, Δύο Iσπανοί λυρικοί: Χιμένεθ και Λόρκα [Two Spanish lyrical
poets: Jiménez and Lorca] (Nicosia: Lyriki Kypros, 1963), 15.
206 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

71. Federico García Lorca, Obras completas, ed. Arturo del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1980), 1:
153–4. Hereafter, this volume will be abbreviated as OC.
72. Vera Korfioti, “Το ποτάμι του Λόρκα” [Lorca’s river], in Η Ευρώπη στην κυπριακή ποίηση, 26.
73. Mayhew, Apocryphal Lorca, 27.
74. Costas Nicolaides, introduction to Ψωμί και Ελευθερία [Bread and Freedom], by Doros
Loizou (Athens: Kedros, 1974), 9–22.
75. See Loizou, Ψωμί και Ελευθερία, 99–100.
76. Cf., in particular, Loizou, “Νέα Υόρκη 1968” [New York 1968], Ψωμί και Eλευθερία, 31;
and García Lorca, “La aurora” (OC 485; The Dawn).
77. Loizou, Ψωμί και Ελευθερία, 62.
78. For the importance of the duende concept in Lorca’s American reception, see Mayhew,
Apocryphal Lorca, 3.
79. Loizou, Ψωμί και Ελευθερία, 63.
80. LeRoi Jones, “Lines to Garcia Lorca,” in New Negro Poets U.S.A., ed. Langston Hughes
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 55.
81. Nicos Engonopoulos, Εν ανθηρώ έλληνι λόγω [In the flourishing Greek tongue] (Athens:
Ikaros, 1957), 27–8.
82. Andriana Ierodiakonou, Της Κώμης Αιγιαλού [Of Koma Yialou] (Nicosia: Kochlias,
1983), 9.
83. Fivos Stavridis, Απομυθοποίηση [Demythification] (Nicosia: Ta Tetradia tou Riga, 1978),
36.
84. Cf. Lorca’s “Si muero, / dejad el balcón abierto” (OC 364; If I die / leave the window open).
85. The recordings of Romancero gitano were initially programmed for April 1967 with
the Greek vocalist Arleta in mind, before their abrupt interruption by the regime of the
Colonels. Due to an outright ban on Theodorakis’ music, the composer fled into exile and
the recordings took place in Paris with Maria Farantouri, in 1970. Despite the ban, Arleta
kept singing these songs secretly in Athenian bars and abroad during the dictatorship. See
Arleta’s own liner notes for the album: Mikis Theodorakis, Romancero gitano, with Arleta,
Lyra–SYLP 373, 1978, vinyl.
86. Giorgos Moleskis, Μεγάλο που ήταν το φεγγάρι [Ηow big the moon was] (Cyprus: n.pub.,
1980), 7.
87. Andry Christofidou-Antoniadou, Παλίρροιες [Tides] (Limassol: n.pub., 1986), 39.
88. Andry Christofidou-Antoniadou, Τα ποιήματα της Ευρώπης/The Poems of Europe
(Limassol: n.pub., 2003), 56.
89. Elena Toumazi-Rebelina, Έρχου [Come] (Limassol: Afi, 2011), 47.
90. The Greek adjective for “naked” (=γυμνή) in the original clearly denotes the female
grammatical gender, defining the (otherwise grammatically neuter) body that arises as female.
91. Nasia Dionysiou, “Η γραφή ως εμπειρία” [Writing as experience], in H Γυναίκα στο
Κείμενο [Woman in the Text], ed. Antonis K. Petrides and Demetra Demetriou, spec. issue
of Akti, no. 118 (Spring 2019), 151.
92. Stella Voskaridou, “Λαίμαργα” [Gluttonously], in Λαίμαργα [Gluttonously] (Nicosia:
Aktis, 2019), 46.
93. Kyriacos Charalambides, Ποιήματα: 1961-2017 (Αthens: Ikaros, 2019), 25.
94. Kyriacos Charalambides, “Έκτο τραγούδι” [Sixth song] (unpublished manuscript,
Kyriacos Charalambides’ Archive, 2001).
95. See Zoe Fytousi, Τα τραγούδια μιας ζωής [The songs of a lifetime], Capitol Records,
2007, CD.
96. Charalambides, Ποιήματα, 701.
97. Ibid., 649.
98. Kenneth Koch, “Fresh Air,” in The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (New York: Knopf,
2006), 123.
99. Kyriacos Charalambides, interview by Demetra Demetriou, Nicosia, 7 February, 2015:
“Ποιος είναι ο Λόρκα; Είναι αυτός που σκότωσαν ή είναι αυτός που επιβιώνει μετά τον
θάνατό του;”