Help finding a specific quote

[Sarabande]

Hi all! I'm new here and thought maybe y'all could help me help a friend. My friend is trying to track a half-remembered quote about Leonard. Someone saying/writing that "Leonard Cohen's secret is Lorca" (meaning the poet, not his daughter). Not especifically these words.

Does anyone know anything at all about this? I've been researching for a while.

Thanks! ♡

[LisaLCFan]

So, somebody who is not Leonard presumably made a comment about Leonard Cohen and Lorca (the poet). Um, I don't mean to sound rude, but who cares? If Leonard didn't say it, then it is just somebody's opinion as to what Leonard's supposed "secret" is (and, seriously, that sounds rather absurd). Leonard himself spoke about the influence of Lorca's poety -- so it wasn't exactly a "secret" -- and I should think that that kind of quote --- from the man himself -- would be far more interesting and relevant than anything that some random person may or may not have said or written about Leonard.

Nonetheless, here is an interesting article about Leonard and Lorca, which you may or may not have seen:

https://www.varsity.co.uk/music/20973

[Hartmut]

'Last year it was the 50th anniversary of the death of Federico Garcia Lorca, a great Spanish writer. He was the first poet that ever touched me. And i remember the first lines of his that i ever read that moved me into this delicious racket called poetry. It was: "I want to pass through the arches of Elvira, to see your thighs and begin weeping". That line burned itself into my heart and i've written it over and over again in a hundred songs.'

https://www.leonardcohenforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=4010

[LisaLCFan]

And, another quote from Leonard himself, talking about Lorca, from the speech Cohen made when he received the Prince of Asturias literature prize in Spain in 2011:


"Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice.

It was only when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice, that is to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.

As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”


(See -- these quotes from Leonard himself are far superior to anything someone else may have said!)