When I was fresh from school, trying to learn how to be a reporter at The Royal Gazette, my friend and mentor was its foreign news editor, Major John Barritt. He wasn't a Bermuda Barritt. he was as English as a cricket bat.

He came to Bermuda with his wife and children as a veteran of the Second World War. But fighting for him had lasted longer than for most. He had been a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War for a year or two before Mr. Hitler started making trouble, so for almost a decade his life was, as he told me once with a wry little smile, "just one damn thing after another."

He did tell me which side he fought on in Spain, but I've forgotten. If that should surprise anyone who has been taught to have some romantic notion of a Titanic struggle between the good Left and the evil Right, I have another version of the story. According to the Major, it was a brutal, ugly affair, characterised on both sides by small-minded murder, cowardice and wanton destruction. If it hadn't been for the foreigners who joined in, he said, there would be nothing but horror to remember.

Yet for all the murder he saw, the Spanish people charmed him completely. Read their literature, he lectured anyone who would listen, listen to their music, look at their art, take time to understand what bullfighting is all about. they may be a little stern, but no one can deny that they possess dignity and elegance in measures that put the rest of us to shame.

Major Barritt was not by any means unusual. Roy Campbell was a South African poet and critic who settled in Spain in the early 1930, and who narrowly escaped with his life during the Civil War. Campbell was converted to Catholicism when he was in Spain, and was horrified when the Church became a target. He fled Spain when friends of his, Carmelite monks, were murdered. By the end of the Civil War, 12 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks, and about 300 nuns had been killed.

Yet Campbell, too, loved Spain all his life. He wrote a much-admired study of the Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, in which he said that:

"When people speak about Spain being `backward', they are judging her by a very false standard indeed. When progress was an uphill business, Spain was always very much up in the lead. When it became a veritable break-neck, downward, Gadarene stampede, Spain proved she was equipped with not only a brake in the form of tradition, but a reverse-gear in the form of reaction; and that as far as she was concerned, `progress' was a matter of voluntary opinion.

"A body without reaction," he went on, "is a corpse: so is any social body without tradition. `Reactionary' Spain has, during this century, produced better poetry than any other country; and this is chiefly due to her preoccupation with spiritual necessities rather than immediate physical conveniences."

That would not be considered, in this day and age, a particularly `correct' thought, but I must say it is refreshing to read someone who is prepared to think of the politics of `reaction' in an other than negative sense.

Did the victory of the Right in Spain prevent the sacrifice of something vital in Spain's character at the altar of what the Left called progress? Maybe it did. After all, history has shown that Mr. Marx was wrong all along.

But I don't mean to excoriate Mr. Marx for his flawed ideas about society and economics in this article. That's pretty dry stuff, and one must remember that there are a few among us still caught up in that Gadarene plunge. So we won't go there, as the Speaker of the House keeps saying.

Instead, taking a little inspiration from Dylan Thomas's wonderful poem called The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, I thought it might be interesting to have a quick look at one of the flowers that was driven through the green fuse of Spanish society in the first half of the last century.

Roy Campbell said Spain had produced better poetry than any other country during the 20th Century. That's a remarkable claim. He mentioned a lot of people in his book, but I think if he were alive today, he'd probably admit that his enthusiasm (to say nothing of the poets of the second half of the century) made him exaggerate a bit. There were really only two outstanding Spanish - Antonio Machado and the aforementioned Mr. Lorca.

Machado is almost unknown outside Spain, at least in part because he has never been translated well into English. Three or four people have tried, the most recent being the American poet, Robert Bly. All seem, on the whole, to have failed.

Garcia Lorca, on the other hand, is well known in English, even here in Bermuda, where my memory is that the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society has staged at least one of his plays, Blood Wedding.

About him, Campbell did not exaggerate. If he wasn't the finest poet of the 20th Century, he was certainly an outstanding candidate.

Like Dylan Thomas, Lorca relies heavily on the sound of words. Yet even at the hands of an inexpert translator, his poetry has such power that it's hard to get it wrong. This is a snippet from the very end of Blood Wedding:

.these two men killed each other for love.

With a knife

with a tiny knife

that barely fits in the hand,

but that slides in clean

through the astonished flesh

and stops at the place

where trembles, enmeshed,

the dark root of a scream.

Lorca was born in the southern part of Spain, in Granada, in Andalusia. Anyone who has spent time in Spain will tell you that there are many regional differences in the way people express themselves. Broadly speaking, in the north, people are dryer and more intellectual than people in the south, who are more inclined to the Lorca territory of colour, music and pageantry.

But one shouldn't be fooled into thinking that Garcia Lorca is merely a Spanish, Andalusian poet. He wrote a collection that was published in 1940, after his death, called Poet in New York (he was there attending Columbia University). Critics argue about whether it was his best work, or perhaps his worst. Really, it was a collection in which he showed he had a voice other than the Spanish, Andalusian, one he was known for, and showed that this new voice was as sure and as knowing as the other.

In a poem called Murder, he first refers to the knife of the Blood Wedding lines I quoted above, then gives it an American stamp with this ending:

"What happened? What happened?"

"It was this way."

"Stand aside! Was it this way?"

"Yes, this way.

Only a heart going out."

"Heaven help me!"

Anyone who is familiar with the photographer Weegee's work won't have difficulty visualising that scene. Weegee was plying his trade in New York while Lorca was there. it's fascinating to think about that tiny sliver of a chance that one of his photographs might even have inspired those lines.

In Spain, Lorca had made it clear that he sided with proletarians in their struggle with the bourgeoisie. In part, Poet in New York seems to have been an attempt to establish that the struggle in Spain was mirrored around the world, even in the United States.

His indignation over the plight of the poor was easy to see.

The American critic Conrad Aiken reviewed Poet in New York for the New Republic, and wrote that the book's preoccupation was with ". the agony of the conscious mind in the presence of universal pain."

Yet at the same time, Lorca admired and drew inspiration from the United States. He seems particularly to have admired the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and of the grand old man of American poetry, Walt Whitman.

Not for one moment, Walt Whitman, comely old man,

have I ceased to envision your beard full of butterflies,

your chaste, corduroy shoulders, worn thin by the moon.

Sleep on; for nothing abides.

During the Civil War, apparently in revenge for his support of the poor, Lorca was arrested and murdered by worms acting on the orders of the Civil Governor of Granada. Thousands upon thousands of his countrymen, on both sides of the struggle, were also murdered.

But worms are. just worms, and Lorca was one of the finest poets of the 20th Century.

In death, he became what he himself described, in Back From a Walk, the first poem of his New York collection:

Heaven-murdered one

.the butterfly drowned in the inkwell

gshortoibl.bm