Vasil Popov

There are translated books that are quickly forgotten. There are also those that remain in our consciousness, create new worlds before us and permanently captivate us. These notes will try to explain a charm, so fresh and so beautiful, so strong and so bright - the charm of Halldor Laxness, the great Icelandic writer, creator of "Independent People". In 1902, a boy was born in Reykjavik. He showed great talents and for many years bumped into the stone walls of many philosophies and faiths, until one day he went out into the wide field - facing the dark North Sea and the Icelandic wilderness. Before that, the boy had traveled many countries, stared in awe at the centuries-old monuments of civilization, denied his impenetrably backward homeland, only to return one day and discover the famous skald Egil Skalagrimsson, to fall in love with sagas and legends, to see the harsh face of the harsh truths of life and experience the divine thirst to transform them into art. The boy had already become a man, and abroad he had come to love his homeland, because he had seen it in its true dimensions and magnitude. And a man can say with a firm, confident voice The people slept in the mountains, inhabited by fairy creatures and elves, and in this virgin land, where every valley reminds of our history, every wilderness is a symbol of our innermost feelings, we live today as if reborn children of nature, gifted with sincerity who speak in a divine language, and above us the morning sky dissolves, predictions and signs burn in the forest... In the most remote places lives an unwavering striving for spiritual development. In the present generation there is no sense of satisfaction, this plague bacillus of stupidity in stagnation. Everything is in ferment. People want a deeper, richer spiritual life. In every young Icelandic heart lives a joyful foreboding

There was much debate about the date, as well as the place of the grave. According to some, it was between August 3rd and 6th, according to others - the 16th, according to still others - August 19th, 1936. "A cry," Lorca had written, "and a great horn of fire!" ... He had wanted to be buried in the sand, along with his guitar, but it was not there. He had wanted to leave the balcony open when he died. He had died many times, he had walked with Death, who played his old white guitar at the crossroads, under the orange and olive trees, together with gypsies, with black horses and sinister people, he had been wounded in Seville and killed in Cordoba, he had gone in and out of the tavern with Death. Death from thousands of images, both tender and innocent, both white and transparent - to the stinking, gangrenous deaths, like that of Ignacio Sánchez Mejias, the famous bullfighter, all these deaths merged into one or two shots from a revolver and one from a carbine. Three Granadan lumpens set off in their red Buick on the way back to Granada, to the village of Visnar. On the horizon remain the positions of the Republicans, from where a guitar can be heard, a silent witness to an absurd death. In time, they will look for the poet's bones among the bones of three thousand Granadans buried under this sand dune, but to this day nothing can be said with certainty. Federico García Lorca dissolved into Spanish soil - he is everywhere and nowhere, he has no grave - his grave is Spain. Then one of the assassins was shot by his own colleagues over some smuggling deal, another died of cancer, the third of typhus. Lorca's distant relative - Antonio Benavides - who had arrested him, hoping to appropriate part of the inheritance, had to flee Granada. And the other assassins scattered, disappeared. Only one Francisco Franco remained. And that people remained who can contemplate death behind a fence of saltpeter flowers and can communicate with death, whose most significant things carry its supreme metallicity. After all, Lorca painted this picture: