Thread: What is Duende?
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Unread 04-25-2005, 07:59 PM
Ann White Ann White is offline
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To explain the mystery and importance of Duende to artistic expression, Lorca tells the story of a great Andalusian singer whose performance leaves a modest audience unimpressed one night in a little tavern in Cadiz. “Here we care nothing about ability, technique, skill. Here we are after something else,” they seem to say, according to Lorca. The songstress then tears at her expensive gown, guzzles a tall glass of burning liquor and begins “to sing with a scorched throat: without voice, without breath or color but with Duende” all to the crowd's raucous approval. Lorca says, “She had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her Duende might come and deign to fight her hand to hand…”
I had this writing by Terrance Hayes bookmarked (More Theories of the Duende & Teaching the Inexplicable). The concept of duende is totally out of context for me. I don't have anything that I can relate to it.

Hayes calls it the "gypsy cousin" of surrealism. He quotes Bly: “To help us seek the Duende there are neither maps nor discipline. All one knows is that it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned, that it breaks with all styles…”

Frederico Garcia Lorca, who is attributed with giving "duende" its designation, says, I think ironically: "Very often intellect is poetry's enemy because it is too much given to imitation, because it lifts the poet to a throne of sharp edges and makes him oblivious of the fact that he may suddenly be devoured by ants, or a great arsenic lobster may fall on his head.”

So what is this duende? Can it be shown thru examples? Is it dark? Is it musical? Is it ineluctable? Can there be poetry without it? How does duende fix itself upon words? Is it a learned thing?

Please share.

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