Ladies and gentlemen:
From year 1918, that I entered the Residence of Students of Madrid, until 1928, in which I left it, finished to my studies of Philosophy and Letters, I have heard in that refined hall, where the old Spanish aristocracy went to correct its French beach frivolity, near thousand conferences.
With sun and air desire, I have myself as much boring, that when leaving I have felt like place setting by one slight ash almost on the verge of becoming irritation pepper.
I did not want that moscardón of the boredom entered the room that terrible that ensarta all the heads by a tenuous thread of dream and puts in the eyes of the listeners tiny groups of pin ends.
Of simple way, with the registry that in my poetic voice does not have wood lights, neither bends of cicuta, nor ewes that suddenly are knives of ironies, I am going to see if I can daros a simple lesson on the hidden spirit of sore Spain.
The one that is in the skin of bull extended between the Júcar, Guadalete, Sil or Pisuerga (I do not want to mention to the volumes next to the waves melena color of lion that shakes the Silver), it hears say with measurement frequency: ..This has much duende... Manuel Torres, great artist of the town Andalusian, said to which sang: ..You have voice, you know the styles, but you never prevailed, because you do not have duende...
In all Andalusia, rock of Jaén and conch of Cadiz, people speak constantly of duende and she discovers it as soon as she leaves with effective instinct. The wonderful flamenco singer the Lebrijano, creator of the Debla, said: ..The days that I sing with duende there is not one who can with me..; the old gypsy dancer the Malena exclaimed a day oyendo to touch to Brailowsky a fragment of Bach: .. Ole! That has duende! .., and she was boring with Gluck and Brahms and Darius Milhaud. And Manuel Torres, the man of greater culture in the blood who there am well-known, said, listening to the own Fault his Nocturnal one of the Generalife, this splendid phrase: ..Everything what has black sounds has duende... And there is no greater truth.
These black sounds are the mystery, the roots that nail in the slime that all we know, that all we ignored, but from where it arrives to us what is substantial in the art. Black sounds said the popular man of Spain and agreed with Goethe, who makes the definition of duende when speaking of Paganini, saying: ..To be able mysterious that all feel and that no philosopher explains...
Thus, then, duende is a power and not to build, it is to fight and not to think. I have heard say to an old teacher guitarist: ..Duende is not in the throat; duende raises on the inside from the plant of the feet... That is to say, it is not question of faculty, but of true alive style; that is to say, of blood; that is to say, of viejísima culture, creation in act.
This ..mysterious power that all feel and that no philosopher explains.. is, in sum, the spirit of the mountain range, he himself duende who embraced the heart of Nietzsche, who looked for it in his outer forms on the Rialto bridge or in the music of Bizet, without finding it and knowledge that duende that he persecuted had jumped of mysterious the Greeks to the dancers of Cadiz or the dionisíaco shout degollado of siguiriya of Silverio.
Thus, then, I do not want that nobody confuses to duende with the theological demon of the doubt, to which Lutero, with a báquico feeling, threw a red bottle to him in Núremberg, nor with the catholic, destructive and little intelligent devil, that disguises themselves of dog to enter the convents, nor with the monkey talking that takes truchimán of Cervantes, in the comedy of the jealousy and the forests of Andalusia.
No. Duende of which I speak, dark and shaken, is descending of that alegrísimo demon of Sócrates, marble and salt that the day in which it took cicuta, and of other melancholic demonillo of Descartes, small scratched indignant like green almond, that, very circles and lines, left by the channels to hear sing the drunk sailors.
All man, all artist will call Nietzsche, each scale that raises in the tower of its perfection is at the cost of the fight that maintains with duende, not with an angel, since is saying, nor with his musa. It is precise to make that fundamental distinction for the root of the work.
The angel guides and gives like San Rafael, he defends and he avoids like San Miguel, and he comes up like San Gabriel.
The angel dazzles, but he flies on the head of the man, is superficially, he spills his grace, and the man, without no effort, makes his work or its affection or its dance. The angel of the way of Damascus and the one that entered by the cracks of balconcillo of You take root, or the one that he follows the passages of Enrique Susson, orders and there is way no to be against to his lights, because he shakes his steel wings in the atmosphere of the predestined one.
Musa dictates, and, in some occasions, it blows. He can relatively little, because distant and so he is already tired (I have seen it twice), that I had to put average marble heart to him. The poets of musa hear voices and they do not know where, but they are of musa that encourages them and sometimes merienda. As in the case of Apollinaire, great poet destroyed by horrible musa whereupon painted divine the angelical Rousseau. Musa wakes up intelligence, it brings landscape of columns and false flavor of laurels, and intelligence is often the enemy of the poetry, because it imitates too much, because it elevates to the poet in a bond of acute edges and it makes him forget that suddenly the ants can be eaten or a great arsenic lobster can fall him in the head, against which they cannot musas that there is in the monóculos or the lacquer rose lukewarm of the small hall.
Angel and musa come from outside; the angel gives lights and musa gives forms (Hesiod learned of them). Gold bread or folds of túnicas, the poet receives norms in its small wood of laurels. However, to duende it is necessary to wake up it in the last rooms of the blood.
And to reject the angel and to give a kick musa, and to lose the fear to the fragrance of violets that exhale the poetry of century XVIII and to the great crystal telescope whose to duer musa to me ill of limits.
The true fight is with duende.
The ways are known to look for God, from the Barbarian way of the hermit to the subtle way of the mystic. With a tower like Santa Teresa, or with three ways like San Juan de la Cruz. And although we must cry out with voice of Isaiah: ..Truely you are hidden God.., after all God commands which it looks for his to it first fire thorns.
In order to look for duende there is map nor no exercise. Single that is known that it burns the blood like a glass topic, that exhausts, that rejects all the sweet geometry learned, breaks the styles, that does that Goya, teacher in the grays, in the platas and in the roses of the best English painting, it paints with the knees and the fists with horrible bitumen black; or that undresses to Mosén Cinto Verdaguer with the cold of the Pyrenees, or it takes to Jorge Manrique to hope to the death in the desert of Ocaña, or dresses in a green suit saltimbanqui the delicate body Rimbaud, or at dawn puts eyes of fish died to count Lautréamont of boulevard.
The great artists of the south of Spain, flamenco gypsys or, either sing, or dance, or touch, know that any emotion without the arrival of duende is not possible. They deceive people and can give sensation of duende without having it, as they every day deceive literary authors or painters or seamstresses to you without duende; but he is enough to pay attention a little, and not to let themselves take by the indifference, to discover the trap and to make him flee with his coarse artifice.
Once, the ..flamenco singer.. Andalusian Shepherd Pavón, the Girl of the Combs, shady genius Hispanic, equivalent in capacity of fantasy to Goya or Rafael the Rooster, sang in one tabernilla of Cadiz. She played with his voice of shade, with his fused tin voice, its voice covered with moss, and was entangled it in the hair or it wet it in manzanilla or it lost it by dark and lejanísimos jarales. But nothing; he was useless. The listeners remained shut up.
There she was Ignacio Espeleta, beautiful like a Roman turtle, that once they asked: .. How you do not work? ..; and it, with a worthy smile of Argantonio, responded: .. How I am going to work, if I am of Cadiz..
There she was Eloísa, the hot aristocrat, ramera of Seville, direct descendant of Solitude Vargas, who in the thirty was not wanted to marry with a Rothschild because she did not equal it in blood. There they were the Flowery ones, which people create butchers, but that in fact is millenarian priests who continue sacrificing bulls Gerión, and in an angle, the imposing cattle dealer Don Pablo Murube, with air of cretense mask. Pavón shepherd finished singing in the middle of silence. Single, and with sarcasm, a pequeñito man, of those hombrines dancers who leave, suddenly, of the bottles of brandy, said with very low voice: .. the Alive Paris! .., like saying. ..Here they concern the faculties to us, neither the technique, nor the masters. It concerns another thing to us...
Then the Nina of the Combs rose like a crazy person, tronchada just as weeping a medieval one, and a great glass of cazalla like fire drank of a drink, and it seated to sing without voice, out of breath, without shades, with the burnt throat, but.. with duende. It had managed to kill all the scaffolding of the song to open the way duende furious and burning, sand wind friend loaded, that caused that the listeners were almost torn the suits with he himself rate whereupon the Antillean black of the rite are broken, crowded together before the image of Santa Barbara.
The Girl of the Combs had to tear her voice because she knew that it she was oyendo exquisite people who did not request forms, but marrow of forms, pure music with the body sucinto to be able to stay in the air. She had herself to impoverish of faculties and securities; that is to say, she had to move away his musa and to remain abandoned, that his duende came and it deigned to fight to divided arm. And as she sang! Its voice no longer played, its voice was a spurt of worthy blood by its pain and its sincerity, and it opened myself as a hand of ten fingers by the feet nailed, but full of storm, a Christ de Juan de Juni.
The arrival of duende always estimates a radical change in all the forms on old planes, gives totally unpublished sensations of freshness, with a quality of rose just created, of miracle, that gets to produce an almost religious enthusiasm.
In all Arab music, it dances, song or it chose, the arrival of duende is saluted with energetic .. Wing, Wing! .., .. God, God! .., so near .. Olé.. of the bulls, that who knows if it will be the same; and in all the songs of the south of Spain the appearance of duende is followed by sincere shouts of .. Alive God! .., deep, human, tender shout of a communication with God by means of the five senses, thanks to duende that it shakes the voice and the body of the dancer, real and poetic evasion of this world, as pure as the obtained one by the rarest poet of XVII the Pedro Soto de Rojas through seven gardens or the one of Juan Calímaco by a trembly scale of weeping.
Naturally, when that evasion is obtained, all feel their effects: the initiate, seeing how the style wins to a poor matter, and the ignorante, in I do not know what of one authenticates emotion. Years ago, in an aid of Sherry dance of the Border one took to the prize old of eighty years against beautiful women and girls with the water waist, by the single fact to raise the arms, to raise the head and to give a blow with the foot on tabladillo; but in the meeting of musas and angels who were there, beauties of form and beauties of smile, it had to win and it gained that duende dying that dragged by the ground its wings of oxidized knives.
All the arts are able of duende, but where it finds more field, as he is natural, is in music, the dance and the spoken poetry, since these need an alive body that it interprets, because they are forms that are born and die of perpetual way and raise their contours on an exact present.
Often duende of the musical one spends to duende of the interpreter and other times, when the musician or the poet is not such, duende of the interpreter, and this is interesting, creates a new wonder that it has in the appearance, nothing else, the primitive form. So the case of the enduendada Eleonora Duse, who looked for failed works to make them prevail, thanks to which she invented, or the case of Paganini, explained by Goethe, who made hear melodías deep of true vulgarities, or the case of a delicious girl of the Port of Santa Maria, to whom I saw him sing and dance the Italian horroroso cuplé Or Mari! , with rates, silencios and an intention that made of pacotilla Italian a dawn raised gold serpent. What happened was that, indeed, they found some thing new that nothing had to do with the previous thing, that they put blood alive and science on empty bodies of expression.
All the arts, and even the countries, have capacity of duende, angel and musa; and as well as Germany has, with exceptions, musa, and Italy has angel permanently, Spain is in all times moved by duende, like country of music and millenarian dance, where duende expresses lemons at daybreak, and like death country, like country opened to the death.
In all the countries the death is an aim. It arrives and the curtains are run. In Spain, no. In Spain they rise. Many people live there between walls until the day in which they die and they remove them to the sun. A dead in Spain is more alive like dead than nowhere of the world: it hurts his profile like the edge of a knife barber. The joke on the death and its quiet contemplation is familiar to the Spaniards. From the dream of the skulls, of Quevedo, to the rotted Bishop, of Valdés Leal, and from the Marbella of century XVII, died of childbirth in half of the way, that says:
The blood of my entrails
covering the horse it is.
The legs of your horse
they throw fire of tar..
to the recent young man of Salamanca, died by the bull, that cries out:
Friends, who I die;
friends, I am very bad.
Three handkerchiefs I have inside
and this that I put they are four..
there is a railing of saltpeter flowers, where a town of contempladores of the death shows itself, with versicles of Jeremías by the roughest side, or with fragant cypress by the lírico side; but a country where most important of everything it has a last metallic value of death.
The blade and the wheel of the car, and the knife and the beards pinchonas of the shepherds, and the bare moon, and the humid fly, and cupboards, and the demolitions, and the saints covered with embroider, and the lime, and the hiriente line of eaves and viewpoints have in Spain tiny grass of death, perceivable references and voices for an alert spirit, who calls the memory to us with the air yerto of our own transit. All the related Spanish art with our mountain range is not chance, plenty of thistles and definitive stones, the lamentation of Pleberio is not an isolated example or the dances of the teacher Josef Maria de Valdivieso, the one is not a chance that of all the European ballad stands out this loved Spanish:
- If you are my pretty friend,
how you do not watch, I gave to me?
- Eyes whereupon watched to you
in the shade I occurred them
- If you are my pretty friend,
how you do not kiss I gave to me?
- Lips whereupon kissed to you
to the mountain range I occurred them.
- If you are my pretty friend,
how you do not embrace, I gave to me?
- Arms whereupon embraced to you
with worms I covered them.
Nor he is stranger who in the dawn of our lírica sounds this song:
Within the orchard
I will die
within the rosal
to kill they have to me.
I went away, my mother,
the roses to take,
it found the death
within the orchard.
I went away, mother,
the roses to cut,
it found the death
within the rosal.
Within the orchard
I will die,
within the rosal
to kill they have to me.
The heads frozen by the moon that painted Zurbarán, the yellow butter with the yellow lightning of the Greco, the story of father Sigüenza, the complete work of Goya, the apse of the church of the Dump, all the policromada sculpture, cripta of the ducal house of Osuna, the death with the guitar of the chapel of the Benaventes in Medina de Rioseco, are equivalent to the cult in romerías of San Andrés de Teixido, where the deads take site in the procession, to the songs of deceaseds who at night sing the women of Asturias with full lights of November flames, to the song and dances of the sybil in the cathedrals of Majorca and Toledo, to dark ln tortosino Recort and the innumerable rites of the Good Friday, that with the most cultured celebration of the bulls form the popular triumph of the Spanish death. In the world, only Mexico can be taken of the hand with my country.
When musa sees arrive at the death closes the door or raises a plinth or walks a ballot box and writes epitafio with wax hand, but immediately it returns to tear his laurel with a silence that vacillates between two breezes. Under the arc truncated of oda, it joins with funeral sense the exact flowers that they painted the Italians of the xv and calls to the safe rooster of Lucrecio so that she frightens unexpected shades.
When it sees arrive at the death, the angel flies in slow circles and tiles with ice tears and narcissus chose it that we have seen shake in the hands of Keats, and in those of Villasandino, and in those of Herrera, and in those of Bécquer and in those of Juan Ramon Jiménez. Pero what horror the one of the angel if it feels a sand, by tiny that is, on its tender pink foot!
However, duende does not arrive if it does not see death possibility, if it does not know that there is to go up to around its house, if it does not have security of which there is to rock those branches that all we took and that they do not have, that will not have consolation.
With idea, sound or gesture, duende pleases of the edges of the well in frank fight with the creator. Angel and musa escape with violin or compass, and duende hurts, and in the treatment of this wound, that is never closed, it is the unusual thing, the invented thing of the work of a man.
The magical virtue of the poem consists of being always enduendado to baptize with dark water to all those that watch it, because with duende it is easier to love, to include/understand, and is safe to be loved, to be included/understood, and this fight by the expression and the communication of the expression acquires sometimes, in poetry, mortal characters.
You remember the case of flamenquísima and enduendada Santa Teresa, flamenco of not tying a furious bull and to give three him you happen magnificent, that did it; not to be conceited of handsome in front of fray Juan of the Misery nor to give a slap to the Nuncio of Its Sanctity, but for being one of the few creatures whose duende (not whose angel, because the angel never attacks) transfers it with a dart, wanting to kill it by to him to have cleared its last secret, the subtle bridge that unites the five senses with that center in alive meat, alive cloud, alive sea, of the freed Love of the Time.
Winning Valentísima of duende, and case in opposition to the one of Felipe of Austria, that, longing for to look for musa and angel in the theology, was imprisoned by duende of the cold ardors in that work of the Dump, where geometry limits with the dream and where duende puts mask of musa for eternal punishment of the great king.
We have said that duende loves the edge, the wound, and it approaches the sites where the forms are based on a yearning superior to their visible expressions.
In Spain (as in towns of East, where the dance is religious expression) has duende field without limits on bodies of dancers of Cadiz, praised by Martial, on the chests of which they sing, praised by Juvenal, and in all liturgy of bulls, authentic drama religious where, in the same way which in the mass, it is adored and it sacrifices a God.
It seems as if all duende of the classic world was crowded in this perfect, explaining celebration of the culture and the great sensitivity of a town that discovers in the man its better wraths, their better biles and their better weeping. Neither in the Spanish dance nor in the bulls nobody is amused; duende is in charge to make suffer by means of the drama, on alive forms, and prepares the stairs for an evasion of the reality that it surrounds.
Duende operates on the body of the dancer like the air on the sand. It turns with magician to be able a girl quadriplegic of the moon, or flood of adolescent flesh colors to old a broken one that it asks for alms by the wine stores, gives with a hair scent of nocturnal port, and at any moment it operates on the arms with expressions that are mothers of the dance for all time.
But impossible to never repeat itself, this is very interesting to emphasize. Duende is not repeated, as the forms of the sea in the storm are not repeated.
In the bulls it acquires its more impressive accents, because it must fight, on the one hand, with the death, that can destroy it, and on the other hand, with geometry, with the measurement, it bases fundamental of the celebration.
The bull has its orbit; the bullfigther, hers, and between orbit and orbit a danger point where it is the vertex of the terrible game.
It is possible to be had musa with the muleta and angel with banderillas and to be happened through good bullfigther, but in the layer task, with the clean bull still of wounds, and at the moment for killing, the aid is needed duende to hit the nail on the head of the artistic truth.
The bullfigther who scares to the public in the seat with his recklessness does not goad, but that is in that ridiculous plane, within reach of any man, to gamble the life; however, the bullfigther bitten by duende gives a lesson of Pythagorean music and makes forget that he constantly throws the heart on the horns.
Lounge lizard with Roman his duende, Joselito with Jewish his duende, Belmonte with baroque his duende and Cagancho with gypsy his duende, teaches, from the twilight of the ring, to poets, painters and musicians, four great ways of the Spanish tradition.
Spain is the only country where the death is the national spectacle, where the death touches to lengths buglers to the arrival of the springs, and its art always is governed by duende acute that has given to its difference and its quality him of invention.
Duende that full of blood, for the first time in the sculpture, the cheeks of the saints of the teacher Mateo de Compostela, is he himself who makes moan to San Juan de la Cruz or burns naked nymphs by the religious sonetos of Lope.
Duende that raises the tower of Sahagún or works hot bricks in Calatayud or Teruel is he himself who breaks clouds of the Greco and throws to roll to kicks bailiffs of Quevedo and chimeras of Goya.
When it rains extraction to enduendado Vela’zquez, privily, behind its monarchic grays; when it has been snowing for leaving to naked Herrera to demonstrate that the cold does not kill; when it burns, it puts in his flames to Berruguete and it makes him invent a new space for the sculpture.
Musa of Góngora and the angel of Garcilaso has to loosen the laurel garland when he passes duende of San Juan de la Cruz, when
the harmed red deer
by the knoll it shows.
Musa of Gonzalo de Berceo and the angel of the Arcipreste de Hita has itself to separate to open the way to Jorge Manrique when he arrives wounded from death at the doors of the castle of Belmonte. Musa of Gregorio Hernandez and the angel of Jose de Mora has to move away so that he crosses duende that cries tears of blood of Mena and duende with bull head asirio of Mountain Martinez, like melancholic musa of Catalonia and the wet angel of Galicia has to watch, loving astonishment, to duende of Castile, so far from the hot bread and of the sweetest cow that paste with swept sky norms and dry mountain range.
Duende de Quevedo and duende of Cervantes, with green phosphorus anemones the one, and plaster flowers of Ruidera the other, crown the altarpiece of duende of Spain.
Each art has, as he is natural, duende of way and forms different, but all unite roots in a point of where the black sounds of Manuel Torres flow, last matter and uncontrollable and shaken common bottom of log, are, fabric and word.
Black sounds behind which they are already in tender privacy the volcanos, the ants, the zephyrs and the great night tightening itself the waist with the milky Route.
Ladies and gentlemen: I have raised three arcs and with clumsy hand I have put in them to musa, the angel and duende.
Musa remains quiet; it can have the túnica of small you fold or the cow eyes that Pompeya to narizota of four faces whereupon its great friend watch in Picasso it has painted it. The angel can shake hair of Antonello de Mesina, túnica of Lippi and violin of Massolino or Rousseau.
Duende.. Where is duende? By the empty arc a mental air enters that blows with insistence on the heads of deads, in search of new landscapes and ignored accents: an air with scent of saliva, of grass as a child crushed and veil of medusa that announces the constant baptism of the things just created.


Federico Garcia Lorca
Madrid, 1933.

Translation courtesy of Phinneous