And there we see it so camping, giving brinquitos by the roofs of New York skyscrapers or jumping between barrels that float in the greenish waters of the sewers of Manhattan. Early in his red suit, with the bow tie around his neck. Federico García Lorca has taken him everywhere, have reissued his work and replaced his theatrical texts, but they have also taken it out of their lyrics and created new products based on their existence. From films to art exhibitions, through novels or even t -shirts and bags. But there was an adventure that was missing to enter the 21st century: starring in a video game. Now he does it for the first time. Is called Aurora (Down Poet)is based on the poems Poet in New York And whoever plays can handle the Poet Granada while exceeding various tests in his adventure in the Big Apple.
And what does Lorca do on the screen? Are you taking coins as if it were Mario? Not really. The game – which can already be purchased for five euros in Steam – was created by Yellow Jacket, an Andalusian study that aims to create products that, without being didactic, bring new public to new audiences. According to Jesús Torres, its creator, is divided into 10 levels, each based on the “dream world and symbolic” of 10 of the texts of the surreal poems, in which Lorca is accompanied on the trip he made to New York in 1929. The main mission is to rebuild the poet’s writing machine – although Lorca wrote by hand – while discovering the city through its lyrics. For example, in New York (office and complaint)Lorca writes: “Under the multiplications / there is a drop of duck blood; under divisions / there is a drop of sailor blood; under the sums, a river of tender blood,” denouncing, among other things, the dehumanization of the capitalist world. Torres and his team translate it into “a bureaucratic labyrinth (literally) in which Lorca has to seal different documents to get money.” In another, They are black in Cubathe character must enter a clandestine bar while a song “is telling Federico the order of doors that has to open to escape the police.” And so others, with a last mission in which the Granada finishes gathering the keys, “symbolically finds his true self” and finally “manages to cross the Brooklyn bridge, leaving the city,” continues the creator.
García Lorca arrived in New York in June 1929, shortly before crack Bursatile, and found in it a different world of huge buildings that made him feel “killed by heaven”, of dry law, but also of music, film, Harlem. All that sneaks into the letters that inspire the video game. The person in charge of giving a visual life to that molded city in the poet’s mind was Carlos Brayda. “It is a titanic task. Translating one of the great works of literature into images,” he says. His main slogan was, he explains, “not to compete with Lorca in the field of surrealism.”
“In a poet in New York there are many images, each more powerful than the previous one. I have stayed with the emotion that they transmit to me,” he continues. Of course, of the text that opens the game – and that gives it name -, The Auroraa “literal” translation arises to images that serve “as a compendium of the entire line of illustrations that follow the game.” The New York Aurora, which, Lorca wrote, “has four columns of silt and a hurricane of black pigeons that splash the rotten waters,” you can see on the screen, almost literally translated, with a somewhat expressionist aesthetic. “That first and another image are pure surrealism, but for the rest I opted for a more expressionist and emotional realism,” says the graphic designer. The result is a new york of absolute. Or all or nothing, or black or white. “A kind of jail with bars with an ant walking through a cemetery with skyscrapers being huge graves,” explains Brayda.
Lorca’s ‘boom’
“They are going to give us sticks everywhere,” jokes Torres. The creative venture from which Lorca’s pixelated adventure comes out in New York was the way he found his passion – like that of so many others – by the Granada. “Lorca saved my life. I discovered in him a reference when there was none, it was a mirror in which I could reflect and with him I understood that there were many ways of being and loving,” he explains. But its product is one of the hundreds that, especially since 2017, when the poet’s work began to be in the public domain, around his figure have been created.
A Lorcamanía that disseminates his work, but that has turned the poet, in addition to a passion, into a business. Torres is the first to dare to introduce the author in the world of video games. “That is the most complex in this work. It is hard to communicate this to the public videogame, and to the public more of literature communicate that we have made a video game about Lorca. The problem is that I think they can believe that we have banalized the figure of Federic Lorcamanía What it does is blow against it because there is a saturation in the market, but poetry belongs to everyone and cultural agents have the responsibility of being able to promulgate that word. We had to make this game. “His only intention is for the” player to discover the poet’s poetic and surreal language and decide to buy the book. “
In spite of everything, as the creator predicted, the game does not stop generating suspicion. “It is hard for me to imagine Lorca as a video game character, of adventure,” explains Víctor Fernández, journalist, researcher and editor Lorqueano, “especially at that stage of his life. He when he travels is not in his best mood, he does not go by adventures, he arrives trying to overcome both personal and artistic repression.” The poet’s expert also causes him to be confusion the creative licenses that the creators take, such as the non -existent writing machine or that of the poet “managing to leave New York”, as a mission fulfilled: “I do not know if the prize for him was rather to stay. He saw there an open world, he found the cinema, jazz … if we invented things … I do not know. They misrepresent the facts. ”
But Fernández, who has not tried the game – “I stayed with Tomb Raider years ago, ”he clarifies – prefers not to judge him early and recognizes that, although the texts of Poet in New York They are “very, very, very difficult to illustrate,” Lorca himself wanted to do it. “That is, they were also made to contemplate with images,” he says. That Lorcamanía on which he rides Mourualthough in the opinion of the expert the quality of the poet can subtract from the lack of rigor, it can also help spread the work: “It is necessary to disseminate. That it leaves the usual and that modern readings that are attractive are sought, that they approach the people. If this serves to make the keyboard of the computer or the joystick of the playstation then pass to the book, I hope it is.
Lorca lives now, good or bad, in a world parallel to that of mandatory readings or selectivity exams, usual environments of the classics. The Lorca of the 21st century, almost 90 years after its shooting, walks through the subway in bags with the purchase, in the colorful leaves of some comics or hitting jumps in the virtual New York roofs. “I see with envy how it is very difficult to leave in London without buying a souvenir of Shakespeare. Why are we unable to bring pop culture to our writers? Why don’t we make a Spain brand like others have done it with their characters?