Form and Sensuality

The verse of Frederico García Lorca, like that of other ".27 Generation" poets, was colored by a relationship to Arab poetry. Lorca wrote: "When our [Spanish] songs reach the extremes of pain and love they come very close in expression to the magnificent verses of Arab and Persian poets. The truth is that the lines and features of far Arabia still remain in the air of Córdoba and Granada."

It wasn't just the air, of course, that brought Arabic verse to Lorca's ears. It was also Emilio Garcia Gomez's translations in Poemas Arabigo-andaluces. Lorca, in turn, became an inspiration to dozens of Arab poets. The two towering and sometimes opposing figures of contemporary Arabic poetry both listen and speak to Lorca: the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Syrian poet Adonis.

Thus Nathalie Handal, when she wrote Poet in Andalucía, was entering into a long relationship with the Spanish poet. She had not just Lorca as Lorca, but also as he had been heard and recreated by other poets. Handal has a particular familiarity with Darwish's partner in exile, as when Darwish writes, "I'm the Adam of two Edens lost to me twice: / Expel me slowly. Kill me slowly / With Garcia Lorca / Under my olive tree."

Poet in Andalucía, Handal's fourth poetry collection, is a fresh conversation with Lorca, a recreation of his journey to New York, where he was inspired to write Poeta en Nueva York. But Handal's journey does not take her to New York, where she had already lived for many years. One of things that drew her to Poeta was its obsession with otherness, so Handal's was a journey away from familiar New York City, a journey "in reverse." Lorca traveled from Andalucía to Manhattan in 1929-1930. Eighty years later, Handal went from Manhattan to Andalucía.

Lorca saw his work as a sort of portraiture of New York City. Handal's collection also evokes a certain quality of Andalucían light, but it is not primarily focused on the present moment. Instead, Handal looks through time, collapsing it. Writers of the Spanish Golden Age—such as Ibn Zaydun, Ibn Hazm, and Ibn Faraj—find themselves in the same space as Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Gerardo Diego: "there is no time between them."

Handal is particularly drawn to the shadows of Andalucía's joint Islamic, Judaic, and Christian history. In "Alhandal y las Murallas de Córdoba," "The past is here / the song of the Arabs here, / the song of the Jews, / the Romans, / the Spaniards, / and the phantoms." It is clear why: Palestine is not mentioned, but it is everywhere. Palestine is in Murcia, in Toledo, in Córdoba, and in a dozen other places. The narrator of "The Thing about Feathers" does not name a country, but it is hard not to see Palestine: "I am seven / it is the day before our departure, / the day my father / gives me a notebook, / and I tell him, / this is where I'll keep my country."

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Palestine is also embedded in the trudging movement of words across space and time. Because of their shared history, a large number of Spanish words came from the Arabic, and Handal plays with these linguistic migrants. In her noteworthy "10 Qit'as," or "10 Fragments," each section begins with a Spanish word. The poems then shift into English. Finally, at the end of each stanza, the poem turns back to a definition of the originating Arabic term.

In the opening section of "10 Qit'as," titled "Acitara," Handal writes: "Can the sky recover after a bombing / can a house break into two cities, / and secrets hold the wall / between two bodies? / Tell me, what are borders? /// acitara: wall, from the Arabic sitarah, which means curtain."

As the word sitarah moves from Arabic to Spanish, it becomes stronger, more impenetrable. It shifts from a word that merely obstructs...