Generalife

The Alhambra and the Generalife are linked to García Lorca for many historical reasons. But the Generalife and, in particular, the Paseo de los Cipreses (Promenade of the Cypress Trees) and the Escalera del Agua (Water Staircase), have a link that dates back to the summer of 1924, when Juan Ramón Jiménez, accompanied by his wife Zenobia Camprubí, visited Granada perhaps for the first and only time and was fascinated and “wounded” by so much beauty.

The couple arrived, after multiple invitations from Federico, at the end of June. Juan Ramón before Zenobia. They stayed at the Hotel París, located at the beginning of the Gran Vía. Zenobia left for Madrid at the beginning of July, but the poet from Huelva stayed until the middle of that month and then traveled to Seville and from there to Madrid.

The fruit of Juan Ramón’s stay in Granada was the book Forgetfulness of Granada, a mixture of memories, prose, evocations and letters, as well as some famous photographs of the group on the Promenade of the Cypress Trees and in the Partal Gardens.

“Granada has caught my heart. I’m like wounded, like convalescent. There I did not realize so much. It is true that I am very passive, a slave to beauty (…). Then comes the enormous pathetic reaction. I feel a real physical discomfort and sometimes I have to run away from myself, in her, and think of something else. At night and during the siesta, especially, this beautiful discomfort is aggravated in the form of nostalgia,” he wrote recently arrived in Madrid to Isabel García Lorca, then a girl of 11 years old who seduced the poet of Moguer with her innocence and to whom he dedicated the ballad entitled Generalife. “For the Little Fairy of the Generalife,” he says in the heading.

The result of that stay in Granada was the book Forgetfulness of Granada, a mixture of memories, prose, evocations and letters related to that visit, as well as some famous photographs of the group in the Promenade of the Cypress Trees and in the Partal Gardens, the spaces that attracted the most visitors.

Isabel García Lorca left a detailed account in her memoirs of the visit, full of chiaroscuros, of Juan Ramón and Zenobia. The poet from Moguer stayed in Granada for almost a month at the Hotel París, which no longer exists. Juan Ramón, who was a few days ahead of Zenobia, traveled on the night train with Federico and Francisco García Lorca. Just by the smell, Francisco recounted, he was guessing what the fields they passed through were planted with. The next day he went to Lorca’s house, who lived on Acera del Casino, where a year earlier Federico, Falla and Hermenegildo Lanz had staged the famous Christmas puppet show.

On the first outing, by horse-drawn carriage, they went to the Alhambra. Granada, then, was reasonably unpopulated by tourists. “The days before Zenobia’s arrival,” writes Isabel, “she stayed to eat with us; simply because it was lunchtime and she wouldn’t leave.” The afternoons were spent touring the palaces and the Generalife. “This was repeated almost every day. I think Juan Ramón was completely happy in Granada. We would go to the El Polinario, father of Ángel Barrios, in that delightful little patio where Federico went so much,” Isabel recounts. They also visited Manuel de Falla’s house.

The personal impressions of Juan Ramón Jiménez were exposed in the letter he wrote to Zenobia from the ungrateful hotel in Granada: “The Lorcas have shuddered with me these days and I hardly come to the hotel except to sleep because the noise continues as on the first day, and the heat, for three days, has been truly unbearable. They have taken me to new delightful places: La Vega, cheerful and fragrant and fresh; the Bola de Oro, the most beautiful for me of the Granada landscape, with aspects of Florence, Rome, the Pyrenees, Seville…; and this Verbena de San Pedro, of which it is not possible to give an idea in a letter like this”.

Before the misunderstandings could spoil the courteous atmosphere of the visit, in November of the same year, once the beauty of Granada had been digested, Juan Ramón Jiménez sent Isabel the ballad Generalife “that I made in August for her, in exchange for a precious portrait”, a poem of singular importance in Juan Ramón’s work full of light and transparency where the garden and the water are twinned with the background of the Generalife to create “the greatest lyrical monument to water” in our history.