La sangre derramada

Ignacio Sánchez Mejías once confessed to a journalist that his dream was to fight in New York, a city without bullfighting or real squares (not even urbanistically speaking) but with many pugilistic forums, stirrups of modern exchange and artistic debate. He never did, he never fought in his grid, but he did dictate, in one of the rooms of Columbia University, a vibrant and brilliant lecture on bullfighting, The Pass of Death, which would sow a fertile seed in those who heard it, and very markedly in García Lorca. That text influenced, perhaps like no other, the work of Taurus and bullfighting profile of Federico, but not only that text: it is possible to establish the magisterium and its progress from the moment that sword and poet meet and become intimate, in 1927. The first part of this book is devoted to the study of this influence on poetry, prose, theater, and Lortex paratexts. But The Death Pass had long been asking for attention and care, for its intrinsic value and poetic quality. Hence, in a second section, its history is analyzed and it is claimed to place it in the place that belongs to it, establishing for the first time its ancestors (from Piedras Albas to Santa Teresa and from this to Miguel de Unamuno) and fixing, from the Preserved pages of the manuscript, the machine copy and the versions given to the printing press, its critical edition, which complements and frames the facsimile reproduction of the original documents. Sánchez Mejías prepared that talk in the room of the Ansonia hotel in New York that he shared with Encarnación López Júlvez, the Argentinite, and he did it without any documentary help, but with a rare freshness, eloquence and freedom. Neither the bullfighting nor the anti-bullfighting reader should deprive themselves of this festival, which is cosmopolitan rather than national.