Egon Schiele’s Birth Anniversary and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love

One of my favourite painters ever, Egon Schiele, was born on this day in 1890, so naturally, my thoughts are nearly all with him today. I have been an ardent lover and admirer of his art for years now, but another work of art, with a darkness and eroticism that matches that of Schiele’s art, has occupied me these days: Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Sonnets of Dark Love”, translated by Paul Archer here. As I was reading Lorca’s beautiful sonnets, one by one, slowly, half-soaking in the strange verses and half-daydreaming, I had Schiele’s paintings in mind, or rather, the mood that pervades his paintings; darkness, anxiety, death, eroticism and alienation, murkiness of the colours and strangeness of the pale and fragile heroin chic figures, often entwined, together yet distant. I’ve chosen the verses which I loved the most and assembled them together with Schiele’s paintings and drawings.

Egon Schiele, Cardinal and Nun (Caress), 1912

“(…) And then, together entwined,
with love-broken mouths and frayed souls
time will find us utterly destroyed.”

(Sonnet of the Garland of Roses)

Egon Schiele, Two Women, 1915

“Don’t let me lose the wondrous sight
of your sculpted eyes, or the way you have
of placing on my cheek at night
the solitary rose of your breath.”

(Sonnet of the sweet complaint)

Egon Schiele, Girl in Black, 1911

“This weeping of blood that adorns
an unplucked lyre, the lusty torch,
this weight of the sea that pounds,
this scorpion that dwells in my breast

are all a garland of love, a sickbed
where I lie awake dreaming you are here
among the ruins of my downcast heart.”

(Love’s Wounds)

Egon Schiele, Sunflower, 1909

“My gut-wrenching love, my death-in-life,
in vain I wait for you to write me a letter,
like a withered flower I think rather than to live
without being me, to lose you would be better.”

(The poet begs his beloved to write to him)

Egon Schiele, Liebende (Lovers), 1909

“I want to weep with my pain and tell
you – so you’ll love me and cry for me also
in a nightfall of nightingales
with a knifeblade, with kisses and with you.”

(The poet tells the truth)

Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1918

“Your voice watered my heart’s dunes
in that sweet wooden telephone booth.
It was spring at my feet to the south
and north of my forehead flowered ferns.”

(The poet talks on the telephone with his beloved)

Egon Schiele, Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees, 1913

“Did you see in the transparent air
that dahlia of sorrow and pleasure
my warm heart had sent you?”

(The poet asks his beloved about the ‘Enchanted City’ of Cuenca)

Egon Schiele, Mother and Daughter, 1913

“Thus my heart all night and day through
incarcerated in its cell of dark love
cries its melancholy at not seeing you.”

(Sonnet in the style of Góngora in which the poet sends his beloved a dove)