Sunday, March 20, 2011

tu barda llena de mariposas

"Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies."

Lorca...

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2 comments:

Tim said...

The "beard full of butterflies" — llena de mariposas — is lovely, but this poem (Lorca's "Ode to Whitman") seems to me very problematic. Without getting into that, however, I notice that Lorca in his fulminating contra-faggots list from around the world (faeries, pájaros, jotos, sarasas, apios, cancos, floras, adelaidas) doesn't include maricón. His preferred term for faggots is maricas. There's an interesting thread on wordreference.com regarding the differences between these two. Both seem to be "refinements" on "Oh, Mary!" Possibly because marica can mean (originally meant?) "magpie", maricón came into later more indubitable use ... meaning something like "big queen" (as in, "she's a ..."). I'm way out of my depth here, though, and maybe others can add something of interest.

March 23, 2011 at 7:59 PM
DCSteve1441 said...

Thanks for sharing this lovely line, Robert, and for your learned exegesis of it, Tim. Cheers, Steve

March 31, 2011 at 5:57 PM

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