Lorca wrote a number of long poems that he called 'Odes', although the connection between the forms that these poems exhibit and Greco-Latin verbal structures of the same name is remote. One of them, the 'Ode to Walt Whitman', is famous, often translated and much anthologized. On the one hand, it seems a hymn to yet another avatar of the dying and rising god. On the other hand, it is a didactic poem, encouraging a proper way of being homosexual and denouncing other modes of homosexual being, particularly those that are parasitical on heterosexual styles. In any case, precisely because it has been done many times and frequently done very well, we, at the Collective, are steering clear of this wonderful poem. Instead, as mentioned in an earlier post, we are translating two other Lorca's odes, the 'Ode to Salvador Dali' and the 'Ode to the Most Blessed Sacrament.' Neither is as immediately accessible as 'Walt Whitman', but both are thick with the rich Surrealistic imagery that characterized Lorca's poetry in the late 20's and early 30's. While, initially, there seemed little to connect the three odes, the translation work itself began to reveal some common imagery (e.g., rivers, the dying and rising god), and slowly a conception of these three works forming a coherent triology began to take hold.
Schopenhauer is known to fans to Wagnerian opera but is otherwisealmost forgotten today outside of university philosophy courses and even there remembered primarily as Nietzsche's precursor. This state of cultural ignorance is unfortunate, not so much because of Schopenhauer's philosophical achievements (although he probably deserves more credit here than he gets,) but because of a) his world historical role in propagating knowledge of Vedantic and Buddhist texts to the West (in however a distorted a form - although the Collective thinks that the amount of distortion has been overstated) and b) the incredibly broad influence of own philosophical system on the 'cultured middle class', particularly in Germany and the Spanish speaking worlds. Now Brian Magee, in his brilliant study, Wagner and Philosophy (called The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy in the USA), makes a compelling case that whilst The Ring of Nibelung is fundamentally a Schopenhauerian cosmology/cosmogony, his other three 'late' operas - 'Tristan and Isolde', 'The Mastersingers', and 'Parsifal' represent explorations of the central three solutions proposed by Schopenhauer to the negations he saw lying at the heart of being: respectively Love, Art, and Religion. (btw, Collectivistas sometimes argue that Verdi's 'Don Carlo' and then 'Otello', 'Falstaff', and the Requiem Mass are a parallel project but that may be pushing it.) Now, mindful of Schopenhauer's pull on the spirits of the Spanish speaking intelligentsia (as well as Wagner's for that matter), we are increasingly coming to believe that the three Odes are, in fact, Lorca's attempt to present the three Schopenhauerian solutions to a Schopenauerian cosmology/cosmogony, articulated in his case by 'Yerma.' As the translation work continues (and, yes, these Odes are making the Collective sweat!), we will elaborate on this interpretation (and link it to some of our Summer reading.)
He looks like he means business...ouch. 
