![]() However perhaps they are also concerned about the recent disappearance of a young girl, last seen acting strangely on a balcony overlooking the bitter sea? Perhaps they have already found her body in the water? I believe it is perfectly plausible that the Guarda Civil want to talk to the young man about the girl, maybe they want to do this more than arrest him for smuggling. In other readings it is suggested the Guarda Civil are pursuing the man because of his smuggling activities, which is logical. We know she died at night because the moon, in all her deathly pallor, is shining, holding the girl in his long, icy arms. Like a photograph we see her body hovering above the surface of the water. Notice the father says she belongs to the young man not to him ‘your bitter girl’, not ‘my bitter girl’, but then he is not who he is, nor is his house his house, so what can we be sure of? Nothing.Ī beautiful image of the girl suspended in time. ‘Where is she?’ the father asks the young man, with a slight hint of accusation, ‘where is your bitter girl?’ Notice how the girl shares the same property, bitterness, as the sea in which she drowned. The young man probably doesn’t know she’s dead at this point, but we can’t be certain. Since Lorca would have appreciated the farcical nature of tragedy, I would suggest the later. If we follow the time markers in the poem, the girl either died the night before the young man returned home, or the same night he returned home. Does the young man know his lover is dead? Impossible to say. The father does not know his daughter is dead because she died very recently. The two men have climbed up to the balcony where everything is, naturally, very strange and dream like. However whether they’re asleep or not is debatable, they are certainly wary, hallucinating, seeing, as Lorca himself said he saw, a thousand crystal tambourines wounding the dawn. Why is the poem called ‘The Sleepwalking Ballad’? Well, if there is any sleepwalking at all in the poem it is in the above extract. A disruptive presence to the natural order of things. Who is he if he is not who he is? An angel? A devil? He is a trickster. His presence in the poem is mysterious and inexplicable, he fractures reality: ‘I am not I’ (beautiful in Spanish: “yo ya no soy yo”). The other character in this extract appears to be the father of the girl. Only, as we know, he’s too late, she’s dead. The young man, like Odysseus, is trying to make it back to his lover. He has been traveling from the gates of Cabra to his home, an unnamed town on the banks of the bitter sea. He is a smuggler, hurt on the run from the Guarda Civil. One of whom, the young man, is hallucinating because of his wounds. We are confronted with not one but two unreliable narrators. This is the most difficult part of the poem. There is also a gentle touch of Romeo and Juliet, they are star crossed lovers, in fair Andalusia where Federico lays his scene. ![]() The girl’s similarities with tragic figures Ophelia and Sappho are unlikely to be coincidental, Lorca loved Shakespeare and Ancient Greek literature. The balcony is the place where the girl waited for her lover, the male protagonist, to return to her, only he came back a little too late. The girl is not on the balcony, she is in the bitter sea where she dreams of the balcony. Her cold silver eyes cannot see anything, another clear indication of her death, as is the presence of the moon, who in Lorca often walks hand in hand with death. The refrain could represent many things but seems most likely to be the male protagonist pining for his dead lover, ‘Alive, how I want you alive’, he could be singing, but then it could just be the wind… The return of the famous refrain: “V erde que te quiero verde”, problematic in English as we don’t have a verb which combines love and desire. Later in the poem we learn her hair is naturally black, so the green sheen points to her death, as do her cold silver eyes. Here we are introduced to the female protagonist, who is apparently dreaming. ![]() Green, however, has many other connotations… More simply, green is Lorca’s favourite color (he uses it more than any other colour in his poetry, white second, blue third - count if you like!). Why green? ‘The Sleepwalking Ballad’ is loaded with symbols of death, so green, the colour of life would appear to represent a direct contrast. Nevertheless there is a fairly clear narrative in the poem which is not, always, hard to follow. ‘The Sleepwalking Ballad’ is a very mysterious poem, Lorca himself said it remained as much as mystery to him as to anyone else, indeed, a large part of its charm rests on its inexplicability. I am writing this not to place my ideas above anybody else's’, nor to suggest I am an expert, I am merely a Lorca devotee presenting a close reading of one of his poems. What exactly happens in Lorca’s Sleepwalking Ballad?
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