Federico García Lorca wrote this series of essays during school trips across Spain with his classmates at the Universidad de Granada led by their professor, Martín Domínguez Berrueta. They visited and studied places with great historic value in Castilla and Granada, and Lorca's writings exposed me to a Spain that was as new to him as it is to me (I've not read all that much modern Spanish literature). These reflections on the crumbling monasteries, cemeteries and the Castillan and Andalusian landscapes are his first published book, and while he cautions the reader not to expect too much, I though they were quite enjoyable and found it remarkable that they were written by a (rather precocious) teenager.

In some of his impressions, the places they visit are connected to Spain's literary past: they visit Ávila, the home of Santa Teresa, and also the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, where El Cid's wife and daughters stayed while he went and fought the Moors in the south and where Rodrigo himself is buried. I especially liked these, because they showed me Lorca's appreciation of his country's literary tradition. He writes of the legend of Doña Jimena and the eternal image of her awaiting the return of her husband, and his words made me want to grab the Romancero off my bookshelf and remind myself of how she's portrayed in those poems. I thought it was cool to see how Lorca, as he gets to know his own country during his teenage years, classifies what he's seeing according to the books he's read and loved.

One impression I particularly enjoyed was written upon a visit to an orphanage for sick children. Machado has a poem about an orphanage in Campos de Castilla and it's impossible to imagine that Lorca hadn't read that other portrait of a dark, forgotten building where children peek out of windows onto the desolate, barren landscapes of Castilla that surround them. So it's as if Lorca is seeing this place through his own eyes, but also through those of Machado, and it's therefore interesting to see how his essay differs from Machado's poem. Lorca writes how the sight of these sick children awaiting death in an asylum awakens strong desires of equality in him. To me, this note of solidarity, that he wants to live in a world where these people are his equals, goes a step farther than Machado's portrait. I felt that Machado was more of an observer seeking to awaken the world to the bitter reality of the lives of some of its members, whereas Lorca wants to become a participant in the struggle of the less fortunate and share their suffering. That note of solidarity pleased me and made me like the young writer a bit more than I already did.

My favorite, though, involves a trip to a monastery where he plays the organ with two monks. One of them has lived in isolation for most of his life and has never heard the secular classical music that Lorca plays him. As he's introducing the innocent monk to the sounds of the outside world, another monk comes to the door, his face pale and anguished. He asks Lorca to please, please play on; when Lorca finishes playing, or can't go on because he's forgotten the rest of the piece, the monk storms out of the room without a word. He later explains that the sounds he's hearing remind him of an outside life he once, a life he came to see as false and chose to abandon. Lorca is shocked and finds it admirable that a man as wise and worldly as the monk came here to live in the convent (where, amongst others, Unamuno visits him). The first monk's life without music seemed cruel, but the second's determination to leave the world of secular music behind is a more mysterious decision, one that is difficult for Lorca to come to terms with. He, a young man with the world opening up to him, is moved by his conversation with the old man who has left that world behind to come to the monastery where he hopes to die.

Finally, one great thing about this Cátedra edition of Impresiones y paisajes is that it included an appendix with the poet's epistolary correspondence with his family during his travels. While his impressions are sophisticated and refined, his letters express what a good time he's having and how much he misses his family, how he wants to make sure that his little sister Isabel is eating plenty of food, and how his dad really needs to send him more money since he's constantly running out. I wanted to tell him to stop buying so much junk, because he's always talking about buying stuff and he's always asking for money, and I though maybe he could have been a little more economical and passed on some of the local crafts he was constantly buying. Oh well, he wasn't my child, and I guess it was money well spent since this trip across Spain allowed him to see his own country for the first time and inspired him at a time when he was making the transition from musician to writer. ( )