Federico García Lorca, Valentine

By Natalie DiazFebruary 14, 2013

Federico García Lorca, Valentine

THIS POEM IS A VALENTINE of devouring — simultaneously shadowed and red silken. Is there any other kind?


As well as a valentine, this poem is also a prayer to the body. Readers witness a wanting that nears madness, passion as it meant when it first came to be a word — a suffering, a violence. To invoke the god, Eros.


Instead of hiding them away, the poem licks the bright teeth of its appetite, bares them at “thighs like evening” and “breasts like magnolias.” Lucía Martínez is the air and the sky and the trees and the blooms. She is everything.


Brought to image in the third stanza is that intimate lovers’ moment of almost-annihilation — the desire yet inability to become one, the torture of touch that now greedily represents all that is not touched, this moment of realization and despair that there can be no remedy for such mad-ache other than to crush the beloved, or to climb beneath their skin, or to grab a handful of their hair and to carry and be carried into the purpled dawn.


I’m sending this valentine to you. Why? Because I want to. Because I can.


— Natalie Diaz


 


Federico García Lorca, “Lucía Martínez”


 


     Lucía Martínez.


Umbría de seda roja.


 


     Tus muslos como la tarde


van de la luz a la sombra.


Los azabaches recónditos


oscurecen tus magnolias.


 


     Aquí estoy, Lucía Martínez.


Vengo a consumir tu boca


y arrastrarte del cabello


en madrugada de conchas.


 


     Porque quiero, y porque puedo.


Umbría de seda roja.


 


English translation by Alan S. Trueblood:


 


     Lucía Martínez.


Shadowy in red silk.


 


     Like the evening, your thighs


move from light into shadow.


Hidden veins of jet


darken your magnolias.


 


     Here I am, Lucía Martínez.


I’ve come to devour your mouth


and drag you off by the hair


into the seashells of daybreak.


 


     Because I want to and I can.


Shadowy in red silk.


[more Valentine's Day poems]

LARB Contributor

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Diaz teaches at Arizona State University, and her first poetry collection is When My Brother Was an Aztec. [Photo by Cybele Knowles.]

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