Frederico Garcia Lorca was a dear friend of Dali's, see Lorca's poem 'Ode to Dali' for their history. After writing him the poem Hai Quella Note...! (Yeah that night...!) Dali made this portrait of him.
The Poem:
And the crickets transmitted on the keys of the frost:
- Here the bull charges midnight ecstasy, here are seven 'peones' escorting a big ' espada'!-
The moon, moon, moon, at night his 'nochera' struggled with the barrels of rifles, a slow step of strange maramaldi and a white shirt, in the middle of them.
- 'Why are you going to matár with this moon?' -
They do not know about fate and legend, they close, in skull, imperative events and time surpasses them, in the fog.
A high wall, far from the suburb, the black trie trac of the percussions and a tenor, painter or a poet falls, in the last dawn of the drama.
Silence on the terraces of Granada, the moon is not mirrored inside the well, in the 'plaza de toros' there are cows, no one knows how to die in profile.
Yet he dies! With her shirt open, without the bandage and with her eyes full of that night, her night, shattered by the flames of the muskets.
Flowers and spades play with money, crows croak dyed with parrots, knights no longer ride horses and poets have no caravels.
Doors of every sunset and every dawn the nights close in the cell of stars, the Little Bear, tied to the chain, dances on the edge of old organs.
Federico Garcia Lorca is dead!
Oophy, that night! She cried moongreen, white, drowned in the ineboiled oil of the great Andalusian virgin olive tree, shouted, to the strays, the death of her wolf.
Oophy that night! The bullfighters cried, on the black and yellow sands of sand came alone and sad dead for the deep pit of a poet of double step and of slow 'gaonera'.
Oophy, that night! The gypsies cried, mute, lined with silver and 'guard',
They broke, by force, the guitar strings, fought with the crickets and with the frogs the nacchere, rosaries in their hands, transmitted moans to Santa Sara.
Oophy that night! The children cried, naked at the waist, with old shoes, pink nails and dirty garters, brought apprenticeships and daisies, pieces of brass and car dies.
- A copper coffin, to compose his body
Who made him die? The mud of the world?
The passive ignorance of eternal commanded?
The isosceles triangle? The quadrature of the circle?
No one? No one! He had predicted it.
When a poet dies, fifteen water veins and fourteen palm trees are born in the deserts, lizards know they have to leave and reptiles know they have to hide.
On the soil of every earth Maclodio raised the inaccurate shadows of the already dead brothers, the boys of History rummage inside the mould of the partisan newspapers, printed the next day.
The surreal enchantment of a poet painter runs like a child looking for his own milk, prophecies of darkness and titanic rhymes joke with the pen of four hundred critics.
Can Salvador Dall pick it up intact inside a stravecchio cork frame:
- A 'navaja', a big burning fire and a thousand bulls and a single bullfighter! -
I cannot and cannot go any further, he runs in the shadow of the most crucial time; for a while or tried to follow him from near, he gave me his hand and I my courage, but, Achilles is faster than the Ulysses nonees.
Now I rest, panting, under a tender willow.
He's dead, Federico Garcia Lorca!