DUENDE dancers perform moving, unique, unrepeatable performances
Does Bob Dylan have duende? Do you have duende? What is duende?
Duende is a Spanish word with two meanings.
A duende is a goblin or a pixie that probably lives at the bottom of the garden and gives three wishes to old ladies who deserve a break.
The duende was best defined by Spain’s great poet Federico García Lorca during a lecture he gave in New York in 1929 on Andalusian music known as cante jondo, or deep voice. ‘The duende,’ he said, ‘is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.’
The difference between a good and a bad singer is that the good singer has the duende and the bad singer doesn’t. ‘There are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned.’
Some critics say Bob Dylan does not have a great voice. But more than any other performer since the birth of recorded music, Dylan has revealed the indefinable, spine-tingling something captured in Lorca’s interpretation of duende. ‘It is an inexplicable power of attraction, the ability to send waves of emotion through those watching and listening to them.’
‘The duende,’ he continues, ‘resembles what Goethe called the demoniacal. It manifests itself principally among musicians and poets of the spoken word, for it needs the trembling of the moment and then a long silence.’
Hell & Hieronymus Bosch
Four elements can be found in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death and a dash of the diabolical. I agree with Lorca that duende manifests principally among singers, but would say that same magic may touch us when confronted by great paintings: Picasso’s Guernica, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the paintings of heaven and hell by Hieronymus Bosch.
The duende is found in the bitter roots of human existence, what Lorca referred to as ‘the pain which has no explanation.’ Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better.
Death with Duende
It is not surprising that Spain found a need for the word duende. It is the only country where death in the bullring is a national spectacle, the only nation where death is announced by the explosion of trumpets and drums. The bullring, divided in sol y sombre – the light and shade, is the perfect metaphor for life and death, a passing from the light into darkness. Every matador who ever lived had duende and no death is more profound than death in the bullring.
In every culture, when people die they close the curtains. Not in Spain. They open them and take the body out into the sunlight. A dead man in Spain is more alive when dead than anyplace else in the world.
Federico García Lorca
Who was Federico García Lorca? He was a rebel, writer, playwright, musician and poet born in Granada in 1898. He studied in Madrid, by coincidence, in the same classes as Salvador Dalí and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He researched the structure, songs and origins of flamenco, revolutionised theatre and wrote some of Spain’s best-loved and most read poetry of the twentieth century.
Lorca’s passion was exploring and preserving Spanish folk music. Fifty years later, Bob Dylan from the age of fifteen in his bedroom in Hibbing, Minnesota, began tuning into the music that came over the radio waves at night from the south of the United States. He began weaving together his own poetic and musical visions from strands of jazz, blues, country, folk, soul and Creole. When Dylan rolled into New York aged eighteen, he already had an old man’s head filled with a library of American history and music.
Lorca believed that folk songs should not be copied too literally, but remade from their essence. The poems and themes of deep song belong to no one, he said. ‘They float on the wind like golden thistledown and each generation dresses them in a different colour and passes them on to the next.’
He lived among the poor, the gypsies, the marginalised. He wrote: ‘I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.’ Lorca lived by this philosophy and paid the price. Accused of being ‘a socialist and homosexual,’ he was hunted down and murdered by fascist thugs on 19 August 1936, aged thirty-eight, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
In his anthology POET IN NEW YORK, now a Penguin classic, Lorca predicted his own death and the disappearances of thousands of Spaniards during the Civil War:
When the pure shapes sank
under the twittering of daisies
I knew they had murdered me
They combed the cafés, graveyards, churches for me,
pried open casks and cabinets…
But they couldn’t find me.
Couldn’t they?
No. They couldn’t find me.
My book Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me: the Memoirs of Carlos Lozano – is currently free on Amazon US, UK, Spain, etc. Also available in print and audible.
Outstanding!
Duende, chutzpah, …
Stewart Lee’s feature on Unreliable Narrators (BBC R4, last Saturday evening) had a segment on Dylan “the great liar”: Nish Kumar was presented as an ultimate Dylan expert, in the spirit of the topic.
“In every culture, when people die they close the curtains. Not in Spain. They open them and take the body out into the sunlight. A dead man is more alive as a dead man than anyplace else in the world.”
In the precise context (repressive Spain/Catholic hysteria) of your essay this should read : A dead man is more FREE ….
An educative read, ‘duende’ an essence, like creating in the ‘flow’ for artists.
Beautiful piece! Thank you!
Very interesting Duende great reading?
Very Deep, Very KooL ,,, I can relate to a Duende as a Non Fiction Writer; it sees and tells from the past, looking and whispering to the future.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.dylan/c/FMFhGYDdZTA
2011 discussion of Dylan and Duende
https://www.facebook.com/notes/tara-jane-hulligan-zuk/bob-dylan-and-duende/10154934301388794/
Tara on Dylan and Duende
Interesting ThankYou I wonder if Bob thinks he has Duende ?
He does, but would never say so.
I really enjoyed this interpretation, thank you for sharing.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/edlis.cafe/posts/1308159552555907/
Tara-Jane Hulligan Zuk
· 25 January 2017 ·
Bob Dylan and Duende:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/tara-jane-hulligan-zuk/bob-dylan-and-duende/10154934301388794
“All through Andalusia, from the rock of Jaén to the snail’s-shell of Cadiz, people constantly talk about the duende and recognise it wherever it appears with a fine instinct. That wonderful singer El Lebrijano, creator of the Debla, said: ‘On days when I sing with duende no one can touch me.’ the old Gypsy dancer La Malena once heard Brailowsky play a fragment of Bach, and exclaimed: ‘Olé! That has duende!’ but was bored by Gluck, Brahms and Milhaud. And Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife spoke this splendid sentence: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there’s no deeper truth than that.
Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’
So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.”
García Lorca, Theory and Play of the Duende, Translated by A.S. Cline, 2007
Federico Garcia Lorca wrote about a woman who ‘…began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes…’
Nick Cave spoke about the quality in 1999. “Excitement, often; anger sometimes – but true sadness, rarely.” is how he described duende. It is the ‘terrible question that has no answer’.
To me, it is the duende which makes Bob Dylan so fascinating and moving. It is the darkness, the emotional rawness, the proximity of (and battle with) death, the deep mystery of the unanswered questions.
“Dark sounds, behind which in tender intimacy exist volcanoes, ants, zephyrs, and the vast night pressing its waist against the Milky Way.” (Lorca)
This is the quality of Bob Dylan’s music that some critics and listeners do not understand. When I wrote about Bob Dylan’s voice a few years ago, duende is exactly the word I was looking for to describe the effect. For with Dylan his power is not in technical perfection. Duende is about the emotion, the fire, the pain, the human tragedy, the joy, the easily-crushed fragile tenderness that never sinks into sentimentalism, the intimacy… the ability to touch deep in a way that superficiality can never do.
Duende also means genuineness and authenticity. The ability to convey regret and pain, joy and disillusionment, speculation and knowledge, truth and fiction… the value of a silence and the meaning in a sigh or breath.
It is the power of a moment in time. As Lorca said, “…it’s impossible for it ever to repeat itself, and it’s important to underscore this. The duende never repeats itself, any more than the waves of the sea do in a storm.”
An artist does not succumb to duende, they battle all the way to the edge of rationality and back, knowing human limits of intelligence the entire way. ‘Angel’ represents the superficial style and virtuous elegance, ‘Muse’ is the accepted classical norms of creativity and form. But duende is the spirit and power from within that changes perception and leads to spine-tingling transformative art.
For more reading about the link between Lorca and Bob Dylan, Duende and the connection between Spanish traditions and Bob Dylan, one source is Christopher Rollason’s worthwhile essay for the Oral Tradition magazine (2007) available to read online, Bob Dylan in the Spanish Speaking World.
Notes:
Duende in mythology:
“A duende is a fairy- or goblin-like mythological creature from Iberian, South American, Chamorro and Filipino folklore. Duendes may also have some traits similar to goblins and kobolds.
“The word is often considered to be the Spanish and Portuguese equivalent of the English word “sprite” or the Japanese word yōkai and is used as an umbrella term for any fairy-like being such as goblins, pixies and elves. The Spanish term originated as a contraction of the phrase dueño de casa or duen de casa, “possessor of a house,” and was originally conceptualized as a mischievous spirit inhabiting a house.”
Origins of ‘duende’ as an artistic term:
“El duende is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a physical/emotional response to art. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive. Folk music in general, especially flamenco, tends to embody an authenticity that comes from a people whose culture is enriched by diaspora and hardship; vox populi, the human condition of joys and sorrows. Drawing on popular usage and Spanish folklore, Federico García Lorca first developed the aesthetics of Duende in a lecture he gave in Buenos Aires in 1933, “Juego y teoria del duende” (“Play and Theory of the Duende”).”
Links to read more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende_(art)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende_(mythology)
http://www.duendeart.org/
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/…/LorcaDuende.htm
http://journal.oraltradition.org/…/art…/22i/Rollason.pdf