Status Updates From Selected Letters

Qué maravilla meterse en la vida de Federico de esta manera 💛

"A mí ya no me podéis cambiar. Yo he nacido poeta y artista como el que nace cojo, como el que nace ciego, como el que nace guapo. Dejadme las alas en su sitio, que yo os respondo que volaré bien."

Which you have and will have because you have the blood of a poet, and even when you protest in your letter, you possess amidst brutal things (which I like) the tenderness of your luminous and tormented heart.

but it has no more cojones, as you say, than those of nearly all the consecrated poets. Calm yourself. Today Spain is producing the most beautiful poetry in Europe. But on the other hand the public is unjust. Perito en lunas (Expert in Mirrors) doesn't deserve this stupid silence, no. It deserves the attention and the encouragement and the love of all.

+

But that's the way you learn. That's the way you learn to master yourself in this terrible apprenticeship life is giving you. Your book is bound in silence, like all first books, like my first
book, that had so much charm and so much strength. Write, read, study. FIGHT! Don't be vain about your work. Your book is strong, it contains many interesting things and reveals to good eyes a manly passion,

+

Between one person and another there are spider threads that little by little turn into wires and even bars of steel. When death separates us there remains a bloody wound in the place of each thread.

I also have a great desire to write, an unstoppable love for poetry, for the pure verse that fills my soul, still shuddering like a little antelope, from the last brutal arrows.

But... forward! No matter how insignificant I may be, I believe that I /deserve/ to be loved.