A Note on Salvador Dalí’s “Saint Sebastian”
Salvador Dalí’s “Saint Sebastian” is intrinsically tied to the poet Federico García Lorca. The two first met in 1923 at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid and immediately were attracted to one another. They both had vibrant imaginations, were artistic geniuses and shared many interests including enthrallment with avant-garde movements in art, literature, music and film. In Lorca’s case, the attraction was also sexual. And though Dalí was flattered by Lorca’s interest in him, he was likely unable to reciprocate the feelings physically. In 1925 Lorca began writing his “Ode to Salvador Dalí,” which is both a long love letter and an extraordinary hymn to friendship. Dalí’s response was “Saint Sebastian.” While far less overt in its feelings than Lorca’s “Ode,” it nonetheless captures an important and rather secretive aspect of their friendship: their shared fascination with death and dying, Catholic martyrs, psychopathology, and great art work. In a sense “Saint Sebastian” is a continuation of the conversation the two had been having for years about these subjects.
While it’s very likely that Lorca was well acquainted with art and sculpture featuring Saint Sebastian, it was Dalí who expanded his interest. Saint Sebastian is the patron saint of Cadaqués, Dalí’s home town, and had long been a subject of fascination for him. In 1925, while Lorca was visiting his friend in Catalonia, the two even made a pilgrimage to the saint’s mountain sanctuary in the hills above Cadaqués. |
Now as absorbed in the saint as Dalí, Lorca began working on a series of lectures on the myth of Saint Sebastian but either he abandoned the project or the lectures were lost. Regardless, suddenly, Saint Sebastian was a major focus for both of them.
It’s not difficult to understand why they were attracted to the gruesome images of the saint pierced by arrows. Dalí revered classicism in painting. Even in his most surrealistic painting, classical form is nearly always maintained. In a letter to Lorca from January 1927, Dalí wrote: “What caused Saint Sebastian to suffer and succumb so deliciously is the principle of elegance. Anti-elegance led him to convalesce like a coward.” In other words: suffering can be seen as sublime.
The sado-masochistic element also appealed to Dalí. At the time he was writing “Saint Sebastian,” he was also drawing works featuring severed heads and limbs, including one from 1926 or 1927 entitled “La Playa” (The Beach) in which Lorca’s dismembered head is fused with an outline of the painter’s own skull. Lorca shared his friend’s interest in torturous death. In addition, the highly-charged homo-eroticism, particularly in the famous paintings by Guido Reni, would certainly have appealed to Lorca.
There is no mention of the saint in Lorca’s “Ode to Salvador Dalí.” Rather the “Ode” is a poetic commentary on the painter. Dalí saw his “Saint Sebastian,” however, as not just a wild excursion around the theme of the saint; it was also about Lorca: “In my ‘Saint Sebastian’ I remember you, and even think sometimes that he is you,” wrote the painter to his friend. “Let us see if Saint Sebastian ends up being you.”
It’s not difficult to understand why they were attracted to the gruesome images of the saint pierced by arrows. Dalí revered classicism in painting. Even in his most surrealistic painting, classical form is nearly always maintained. In a letter to Lorca from January 1927, Dalí wrote: “What caused Saint Sebastian to suffer and succumb so deliciously is the principle of elegance. Anti-elegance led him to convalesce like a coward.” In other words: suffering can be seen as sublime.
The sado-masochistic element also appealed to Dalí. At the time he was writing “Saint Sebastian,” he was also drawing works featuring severed heads and limbs, including one from 1926 or 1927 entitled “La Playa” (The Beach) in which Lorca’s dismembered head is fused with an outline of the painter’s own skull. Lorca shared his friend’s interest in torturous death. In addition, the highly-charged homo-eroticism, particularly in the famous paintings by Guido Reni, would certainly have appealed to Lorca.
There is no mention of the saint in Lorca’s “Ode to Salvador Dalí.” Rather the “Ode” is a poetic commentary on the painter. Dalí saw his “Saint Sebastian,” however, as not just a wild excursion around the theme of the saint; it was also about Lorca: “In my ‘Saint Sebastian’ I remember you, and even think sometimes that he is you,” wrote the painter to his friend. “Let us see if Saint Sebastian ends up being you.”
It would have been virtually impossible for most readers to see any references to Lorca in “Saint Sebastian.” What Lorca would have recognized was that the painter had rendered in prose many of the notions the two of them passed back and forth in the years preceding composition. Of greatest importance for understanding “Saint Sebastian” was Dalí’s development of an aesthetic he termed “Holy Objectivity.” This can basically be summed up as a doctrine that eschewed sentimentality and “putrescence” in favor of the “objective gaze.” It is a process not so unlike that which he describes in the prose poem: “In the heliometer’s upper part was Saint Sebastian’s magnifying glass. This was at the same time concave, convex and flat.” In other words, all dimensions can be considered measureable. With this in mind, it is clear that Dalí’s work attempts to measure with quasi-scientific instruments who Saint Sebastian is. The pseudo-analytical manner in which he discusses the saint’s attributes reflects his determination to render the martyr and the legendary iconography in quantifiable terms.
Or as he writes in “The Sea Breeze” section of the prose poem: |
Saint Sebastian’s pain was only a pretext for an aesthetics of objectivity. I inhaled again, and this time I closed my eyes, not out of mysticism, not to perceive more clearly my inner I--as we might platonically say--but for the simple sensuousness of my eyelids’ physiology.
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While the writing is totally original, Dalí did have some influences. The emphasis on scientific gadgetry echoes that utilized by the French writer Raymond Roussel in his Impressions d’Afrique (1910), a book Dalí greatly admired. The Surrealist movement, already in full ascendance in France and taking hold in Spain, as well, is certainly present in the “illogical” juxtaposition of imagery and fractured narrative.
Dalí’s work was always unique. His ability to render outlandish detail with precision would be a hallmark of his painting. “Saint Sebastian” follows the same principle. Or as he, himself, wrote: “I place my eye on the lens, the product of a slow distillation both numerical and intuitive.”
Dalí’s work was always unique. His ability to render outlandish detail with precision would be a hallmark of his painting. “Saint Sebastian” follows the same principle. Or as he, himself, wrote: “I place my eye on the lens, the product of a slow distillation both numerical and intuitive.”
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A Note on the Translation:
While translating Lorca’s prose poems and short plays in the late-1980s (Barbarous Nights: Legend and Plays from the Little Theater: City Lights, 1991) I first came across Dalí’s “Saint Sebastian” and my recollection is that I translated it while in Barcelona around 1987. I was thinking at the time of perhaps finding a publisher to do both the “Ode” and “Saint Sebastian” as a chapbook. But other projects took over and I didn’t pursue it. I did publish my translation of the “Ode to Salvador Dalí” in The American Poetry Review in 1989; it 1994 Alyscamps Press in Paris published a revised version of the ode as a broadside. At the time Alyscamps had a partnership with Tragara Press in England and the plan was for them to jointly publish “Saint Sebastian.” But for one reason or another, it never happened.
Lorca remained important for me. Between 2015 and 2017 I wrote an opera libretto for composer Andrey Kasparov (Lorca: An Operatic Cycle). As the first act of five is set in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, I again researched this part of Lorca’s life. While Salvador Dalí is a prominent character, Saint Sebastian never figures in the operatic version. In fact, I had basically forgotten about my translation of Dalí’s quirky piece until 2019 when my granddaughter Imogene Pruitt-Spence unearthed a copy while she was assisting me in putting together my papers for the University of California, Santa Barbara. I can’t remember why I mentioned the translation to Bronwyn Mills, one of the editors of this marvelous magazine, but she immediately pounced on it. Thank you all at Witty Partition.
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
While translating Lorca’s prose poems and short plays in the late-1980s (Barbarous Nights: Legend and Plays from the Little Theater: City Lights, 1991) I first came across Dalí’s “Saint Sebastian” and my recollection is that I translated it while in Barcelona around 1987. I was thinking at the time of perhaps finding a publisher to do both the “Ode” and “Saint Sebastian” as a chapbook. But other projects took over and I didn’t pursue it. I did publish my translation of the “Ode to Salvador Dalí” in The American Poetry Review in 1989; it 1994 Alyscamps Press in Paris published a revised version of the ode as a broadside. At the time Alyscamps had a partnership with Tragara Press in England and the plan was for them to jointly publish “Saint Sebastian.” But for one reason or another, it never happened.
Lorca remained important for me. Between 2015 and 2017 I wrote an opera libretto for composer Andrey Kasparov (Lorca: An Operatic Cycle). As the first act of five is set in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, I again researched this part of Lorca’s life. While Salvador Dalí is a prominent character, Saint Sebastian never figures in the operatic version. In fact, I had basically forgotten about my translation of Dalí’s quirky piece until 2019 when my granddaughter Imogene Pruitt-Spence unearthed a copy while she was assisting me in putting together my papers for the University of California, Santa Barbara. I can’t remember why I mentioned the translation to Bronwyn Mills, one of the editors of this marvelous magazine, but she immediately pounced on it. Thank you all at Witty Partition.
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno