Duende is a Spanish word meaning a fairy creature and people use the word with that meaning: “A house full of duendes”, for instance. But it also has another meaning for Spanish folklore: it is the spirit, the soul an artist must have, especially a music artist; in the case of flamenco dance, tener duende (to have duende) means to have true emotion, expression and authenticity to feel and transmit the power of flamenco.
In 1933, in a lecture he gave in Buenos Aires, Federico García Lorca explained the elements Duende had for him: irrationality, a bit of the diabolical, an acute sense of death and love of wordly things. The Duende is then, according to Lorca, an alternative to style, to natural virtuosism and charm given by God and is, instead, a kind of force that seizes the artist and makes him give the best of his performance; when the Duende is in action, that same force traps the audience, thus creating conditions to understand spontaneously art with no conscious effort. If you are interested in learning more on the subject, García Lorca’s lecture name is “Juego y Teoría del Duende”.
Some twenty years later, Ernest Hemingway, a famous American writer, was greatly influenced by Spain; among the important influences he received from Spain was García Lorca’s.
It is a known fact that Hemingway had many books of the Spanish writer and also that Hemingway was well aware of details on García Lorca: in his book The Dangerous Summer, about the rivalry between two real famous bullfighters in 1959 Spain, Hemingway comments that while traveling from Pamplona to Granada “... coming down out of the hills...the entry to the ravine where thay had shot Federico García Lorca”. Obviously, Hemingway not only knew of García Lorca but was impressed by the Spanish poet’s death.
Hemingway also had an understanding of the Duende: in a 1962 letter he commented that it was a mistake to read García Lorca to learn Spanish because “if you do not know the dissonances of (Andalusian) music or if you do not know Arabic,(García Lorca’s poetry) is meaningless”. From this we understand that Hemingway did know Andalusian music (flamenco and cante jondo) and the meaning that that music had in the Spanish writer’s poetry: what García Lorca called Duende.
And we may add that maybe that Duende, with its tragic concept of life, also took both men to a violent and untimely death, García Lorca’s by shooting; Hemingway’s, by suicide.
In 1933, in a lecture he gave in Buenos Aires, Federico García Lorca explained the elements Duende had for him: irrationality, a bit of the diabolical, an acute sense of death and love of wordly things. The Duende is then, according to Lorca, an alternative to style, to natural virtuosism and charm given by God and is, instead, a kind of force that seizes the artist and makes him give the best of his performance; when the Duende is in action, that same force traps the audience, thus creating conditions to understand spontaneously art with no conscious effort. If you are interested in learning more on the subject, García Lorca’s lecture name is “Juego y Teoría del Duende”.
Some twenty years later, Ernest Hemingway, a famous American writer, was greatly influenced by Spain; among the important influences he received from Spain was García Lorca’s.
It is a known fact that Hemingway had many books of the Spanish writer and also that Hemingway was well aware of details on García Lorca: in his book The Dangerous Summer, about the rivalry between two real famous bullfighters in 1959 Spain, Hemingway comments that while traveling from Pamplona to Granada “... coming down out of the hills...the entry to the ravine where thay had shot Federico García Lorca”. Obviously, Hemingway not only knew of García Lorca but was impressed by the Spanish poet’s death.
Hemingway also had an understanding of the Duende: in a 1962 letter he commented that it was a mistake to read García Lorca to learn Spanish because “if you do not know the dissonances of (Andalusian) music or if you do not know Arabic,(García Lorca’s poetry) is meaningless”. From this we understand that Hemingway did know Andalusian music (flamenco and cante jondo) and the meaning that that music had in the Spanish writer’s poetry: what García Lorca called Duende.
And we may add that maybe that Duende, with its tragic concept of life, also took both men to a violent and untimely death, García Lorca’s by shooting; Hemingway’s, by suicide.
Daniel Ricardo Yagolkowski
English teacher
Especially for El Duende Bilingüe, 2009
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