On the 18th of August 1936, Federico García Lorca was killed in the opening weeks of the Spanish Civil War. Ninety years later, the anniversary has prompted another wave of books, exhibitions and films, but the most interesting story may be less about what we know about Lorca than about what remains missing.
Lorca’s death is well established, although the precise circumstances and chronology have never been completely resolved. He was arrested in Granada and executed by forces associated with the Nationalist side. His body has never been definitively recovered. The absence of the body has contributed to the mythology surrounding him, but the gaps in the record extend much further: letters were destroyed or hidden, manuscripts were dispersed, lovers remained silent and some of his most explicitly homosexual writing was published only decades after his death.
A recent article in El País‘s Babelia, published three days ago, makes this the centre of its examination of Lorca. It describes an archive “censored” not simply by the Franco regime but by fear, family discretion and the social stigma surrounding homosexuality. The result, it says, is an incomplete record of the poet’s life. Some of the works and documents most closely connected with his homosexual relationships are precisely those that were most vulnerable to disappearance.
The history of the Sonetos del amor oscuro is a particularly revealing example. The poems circulated privately before they were officially published in 1984, and the word “oscuro” was initially dropped from the title of the Spanish edition. For decades, Lorca’s homosexuality was widely known but was often treated as something separate from his literary work. El País argues that this has increasingly become untenable: his sexuality is not simply a biographical detail but an important part of the context in which poems such as those in Poeta en Nueva York and the sonnets were written.
The gaps in the archive have other causes. Lorca himself gave away manuscripts, sometimes unique copies. The Civil War scattered families and possessions. Friends went into exile. Letters were destroyed. Manuscripts survived because individuals happened to take them with them. Poeta en Nueva York, for example, reached publication in Mexico in 1940 after José Bergamín took the manuscript into exile. El público, another important and sexually charged work, was given to the writer and friend Martínez Nadal shortly before the Civil War and was not published until 1976.
The anniversary is now producing new evidence as well as new interpretations.
In July, El País published extracts from the previously unpublished memoirs of Juan Ramírez de Lucas, one of Lorca’s last lovers. Ramírez de Lucas was eighteen when he met the 36-year-old poet. His account, Recuerdos. Breve historia de un amor, is due to appear this autumn, edited by Christopher Maurer and Víctor Fernández. It’s not a contemporary diary of Lorca’s final months but a recollection written years after his death, which makes it both valuable and complicated as historical evidence.
The memoir is particularly significant because Ramírez de Lucas may have been involved in Lorca’s plans to leave Spain. El País has reported that the papers contain new material relating to their relationship and the period immediately before Lorca’s death. The documents are also being incorporated into Manuel Menchón’s forthcoming documentary La voz quebrada.
Another new book approaches the missing Lorca from a different direction. Patricia A. Billingsley’s Lorca en Vermont: El poeta español y su amante americano was published by Taurus in May (it was originally published in English as Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover by the University of New Mexico Press (under their High Road Books imprint) this past May, and the Taurus edition is a Spanish translation by Andrés Barba). Based on more than a decade of research, it reconstructs Lorca’s relationship with the American poet and teacher Philip Cummings. In August 1929, during Lorca’s stay in New York, he travelled to Vermont to spend ten days with Cummings at Lake Eden. Billingsley argues that the relationship, which continued for several years, offers a new way of reading parts of Poeta en Nueva York.
The book is important partly because it moves the discussion away from the familiar image of Lorca as a Spanish national poet and towards the international and personal circumstances in which he wrote. It also shows how much of Lorca’s intimate life has depended on later archival work rather than on material that was openly available to his early biographers.
There will be further attempts to reconstruct that life this autumn. El País reports that Manuel Avís’s Déjame que baile, due from Cabaret Voltaire in September, will combine existing documents with imagined material to construct an affective and sexual portrait of Lorca. It belongs to a growing body of work that treats the gaps in the archive as part of the subject rather than something that can simply be filled with certainty.
Granada is also making the archive itself the subject of the anniversary. The city’s 2026 cultural programme includes Ríos: cruzar el archivo Lorca at the Centro Federico García Lorca, running until the 18th of October, as well as the exhibition Federico García Lorca: 1898–1936. Así que pasen 90 años. The Casa-Museo at Huerta de San Vicente is showing La edad de la ilusión until October.
The question, then, is not whether Lorca remains important. His position in Spanish literature is beyond dispute. The more interesting question is how much of the man behind the canonical figure is yet to be recovered.
It was beautiful to see the tributes yesterday both in Madrid and Granada. Thank you for writing this!
Poema del cante jondo, damn!