 THE BARCELONA REVIEW
LORCA QUIZ
THE ANSWERS
There was no winner,
but some very close calls - the best coming from Emma Thomas in the U.K
and Simon Andrewes in Spain.
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1. In his youth Lorca met nightly with a group of friends to
listen to music, talk, read works-in-progress and discuss current events. The group called
themselves
a.) El Rinconcillo
b.) El Punto
c.) Generación de ‘27
2. After Impressions and Landscapes, a prose account of his travels
through Spain (1918),
Lorca’s first published work was
a.) Book of Poems (Libro de poemas)
b.) Gypsy Ballads (Romancero Gitano)
c.) Songs (Canciones)
3. One of Lorca’s earliest plays, an unfinished "dramatic poem"
called On Love. Animal
Theater, contains a dialogue between
a.) a swan and a horse
b.) a peacock and a cow
c.) a dove and a pig
4. When Lorca’s first play - the dramatic fable The Butterfly’s Evil
Spell, portraying the love of a cockroach for a butterfly - premiered, it met with
a.) critical praise
b.) indifference
c.) a call for insecticide
5. Lorca’s verse play Mariana Pineda (1927), based on the real life
Mariana Pineda, is about…
a.) the erotic longings of a nun who committed suicide to end her
suffering
b.) a revolutionary who conspired to
overthrow Spain’s monarch and was hanged
c.) the wife of a wealthy landowner who murdered her husband to be
with her peasant lover
6. In 1928 Lorca began an avant-garde literary and artistic magazine called
a.) gallo (cock)
b.) coño (cunt)
c.) cojones (balls)
 7. A short, but
instense friendship in the mid-1920s, possibly involving a physical tryst, occurred with
a.) Luis Buñuel
b.) Pablo Neruda
c.) Salvador Dalí
8. Lorca’s pair of décimas entitled "Two Norms" (1928) concern
a.) the two ideals of physical and spiritual love
b.) the two ideals of homosexual and
heterosexual love
c.) the two ideals of marital and extramarital love
9. "Preciosa and the Wind" (from Gypsy Ballads) chronicles the
plight of a gypsy named
Preciosa, a figure whom Lorca lifted from
a.) Byron’s Don Juan
b.) a Cervantes novella
c.) a Lope de Vega drama
10. Lorca’s most radical play, The Audience, not staged until 50 years
after it was written,
contains a scene in which horses
a.) lash and urinate on a naked Juliet
b.) lash and rape a naked Romeo
c.) lash and defecate on Romeo and Juliet
11. The real (as opposed to ostensible) reason why Lorca’s play Don
Perlimplín was shut
down by the government on the day it was to premiere was that the lead role was played
by a retired army officer whose role called for him to
a.) spout Republican rhetoric
b.) dress in a woman’s frock
c.) wear the horns of a cuckold
12. Only one character in Blood Wedding has a name. This would be
a.) Rosa the Bride
b.) Fernando the Bridegroom
c.) Leonardo the Lover
d.) Maria the Mother
e.) Francisco the Father
13. When Blood Wedding premiered in the U.S. in New York, it appeared under
the title
a.) Bitter Oleander
b.) Gypsy Moon
c.) Bride of Andalusia
14. All were Lorca's acquaintances, but the one woman who never acted in a
Lorca drama was
a.) Margarita Xirgu
b.) Lola Membrives
c.) Bebé Morla Lynch
d.) Josefina Díaz
15. On his trip to New York, Lorca spent an afternoon with
a.) Eugene O’Neill
b.) Hart Crane
c.) e.e. cummings
16. A few titles, please . . .
drama
a.) A thousand times happy, she who had him . . .
The House of
Bernada Alba
b.) I’m like a dry field where a thousand pairs of oxen
plough, and you offer me
a little glass of water. Mine is a sorrow
already beyond the flesh.
Yerma
c.) Crushed flowers for eyes, and their teeth
two fistfuls of hard-frozen snow.
Blood Wedding
poems
d.) At five in the afternoon,
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias
e.) There is no anguish like that of your oppressed reds,
or your blood shuddering with rage inside
the dark eclipse,
or your garnet violence, deaf and dumb in
the penumbra,
or your grand kink a prisoner in the
uniform of a doorman.
King of Harlem
17. In 1932 under the new Spanish Republic, Lorca was made artistic director of a
traveling
people’s theater group known as
a.) La Querencia
b.) La Feria
c.) La Barraca
18. Lorca had reservations about a friend’s poetic direction because he
sought to be politically effective through his verse. This friend - Lorca’s rival, in
fact, as heir to reigning Andalusian poet Juan Ramón Jiménez - was
a.) Rafael Alberti
b.) Luis Cernuda
c.) Antonio Machado
19. The last play in Lorca’s trilogy of tragedies is
a.) The Dream of Life
b.) The House of Bernarda Alba
c.) The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife
20. According to Lorca, he wrote primarily female roles in his dramas because
a.) they made better tragic figures
b.) they were easier to work with
c.) there weren’t that many good male
actors
21. First published in Mexico in 1933 . . .
a.) Ode to Goethe
b.) Ode to Walt Whitman
c.) Ode to Rubén Darío
22. In 1936 Lorca was arrested by fascists and later shot in the countryside
without trial on
the official ground - as stated at his arrest - that he was
a.) an inflammatory poet/dramatist
b.) a communist
c.) a homosexual
23. The contemporary North American songwriter/poet who sought direction from
Lorca
would be Leonard Cohen and the name of the song he
produced in 1986, based on a Lorca poem, is Take this Waltz.
24. In the ill-received film The Disappearance of García Lorca (1997),
Lorca is played by
a.) Antonio Banderas
b.) Andy Garcia
c.) Raul Julia
25. Odd name out . . .
a.) Ian Gibson
b.) Leslie Stainton
c.) Peter Ackroyd
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Some Lorca sites of interest:
English:
Federico García Lorca
Homepage: Simon Andrewes presents this site, which is as much about Granada
as about Lorca - and also plugs his pensión and language classes - but it's worth a look.
Federico García Lorca
- Compiled by Michael Crane and including a Bulletin Board - is a good link to consult,
but unfortunately cluttered with banner ads, irrelevant detours and some huge images,
which means that in Spain it takes quite a while to download.
Spanish:
Pagina
de Federico García Lorca
Rincón
verde: Dedicado a Federico García Lorca |
Fiction