If there is one man who has spoken for Andalucía to the world, it is the poet and playwright Ferderico Garcia Lorca. Duende was at the root of Lorca’s poetics. He took years to perfect and explore what duende meant to poetry, and I will attempt to explain some of that here. He wrote:
The duende is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive…it needs the trembling of the moment and then a long silence (viii).
Traditionally in Andalucían folklore, the duende is a slightly diabolical elf who helps the artist realize the limits of logic and intellect and can therefore inspire one to reach beyond these limits to create truly remarkable, “spine-chilling” art. Flamenco dancers are said to “have” duende. It can possess not only the artist or dancer, but the audience who observes one who is channeling duende. Lorca believed there were three art forms most susceptible to duende: dance, cante jondo, and the bullfight.
For the purposes of this blog, cante jondo, or deep song, will be the focus (at least until I get to witness real, non-touristy flamenco, or work up the nerve to go to a bullfight). Deep song is part of Andalucían culture that dates back before the 1400s, when the Roma people (less politically correct: Gypsies) arrived on the Iberian peninsula, bringing with them the siguiriya, the prototype for deep song. In the hot, wild land of southern Spain, siguiriya met Byzantum met the music of the Granadan Moors, and thus deep song was born. Lorca describes deep song as something purely Andalucían, “akin to the trilling of birds, the crowing of rooster, and the natural music of forest and fountain” (14). Unlike nature or sweeping landscape poetry, however, deep song “always sings in the night” (16) Lorca tells us. I understand this statement to mean not so much the literal night, but the darkest recesses of our selves, the places that are both haunted and terrifying but also vast as a night sky be-specked by a wide array of stars. Perhaps most importantly:
The poems of deep song belong to no one—they float in the wind like golden thistledown, and each generation dresses them in a different color and passes them on to the next (17).
With this in mind, I attempt to exist here in the Andalucían gem of Sevilla, where the old city walls hold in their crumbling plaster hundreds of years of lives sung in deep song. I will be listening.
(All quotes taken from Lorca’s “In Search of Duende,” New Directions Publishing Corp., 1998)