Emendata

Good morning, I’m Andrea and I’d like to welcome you to this presentation based on my undergraduate thesis which deals with the poetry collection “Gypsy Ballads”, written by the twentieth century Spanish author Federico García Lorca.

The aim of this presentation is to learn more about the role assumed by the colours in his work, considering their general meanings.

There are two points which I’d like to make.

Firstly, I will present the poetry collection.

Secondly, I will examine the poems in which the various colours appear and then their main interpretation will be presented.

Let’s look at the poetry collection.

“Gypsy Ballads “was published in 1928, it’s made up of 18 poems, written in the ballad style with subjects like the night, death, the sky and the moon.

All of the poems deal with the gypsies, their culture and the Andalusian region.

Let’s move now to the colours.

Green is the colour of life, hope, strength and longevity and for that reason it is considered as the colour of immortality.

In “The Ballad of the Sleepwalker” green is the only colour that is repeated in a constant manner in the various verses of the poem and in the opening couplet, green is not only the colour of life but as some critics noticed, it represents the colour of homosexual eroticism: «Green as I would have you green. /Green wind.

Green branches.

» Black is associated with darkness, evil, pain, sadness and death, Lorca employed it with the meaning of despair, omen of death or as death itself.

» White indicates purity and innocence, Lorca reworked its meaning in its own way and in the “Ballad of the Moon, Moon” it has the meaning of death: «Fly, moon, moon, moon/ for if the gypsies come/ they’ll make rings/ and white necklaces/ out of your heart» […] « Fly, moon, moon, moon/ because I hear their horses./ Child, leave me alone, and don’t/ touch my starchy whiteness.

» Red represents love or passion and also in this case Lorca altered the meaning of this color to attribute a new one that alludes to blood and therefore to death.

This meaning is essentially present in “Death of Antoñito el Camborio”: «He bathed his crimson tie/ with enemy blood/ but there were four blades/ so he had to go down.

» To conclude, colours mostly appear under forms representative of death which was a common theme for poets of the Generation of ‘27.

García Lorca, as a member, lived in the period between the two world wars and that is why the presence of the theme of death is so frequent in this work.

I hope you have enjoyed this presentation. Thank you.