Our first post in this blog: Spain, football and Lorca

In the first article in my Whitmanian Seeds In The Kosmos, my blog on Walt Whitman, I talk about Spain’s brilliant national soccer team and how it is heading to victory at Euro 2008;

however, let us not forget the heroes of its great past.

Spain is talked about all over the world today for its success on the football field at Euro 2008. But in the field of poetry, one of the great Spanish geniuses was Garcia Lorca. This Hispanic poet was one of Whitman’s admirers, and paid a tribute to the American poet in 1929, when he visited the United States and wrote a book called Poeta en Nueva York: Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca (1898 – 1936) was a Spanish poet and dramatist who was killed by Nationalist partisans at the age of 38 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, which was won by Francisco Franco (1892-1975), who was the dictator and later head of state of parts of Spain from 1936 and of all of Spain from 1939 until the end of his life in 1975. Franco’s regime placed a ban on Lorca’s works, which include Primer romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1928), Poeta en Nueva York (1930, published in 1940, first translation into English in 1988, A Poet in New York); Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding, 1932) and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1936). In his book Poeta en Nueva York, Lorca wrote an “Oda a Walt Whitman” (“Ode to Walt Whitman“), to salute the American bard, referred in his Ode as “Adán de sangre, macho, hombre solo en el mar, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman,”.