The great party of ’27 (1927)

The founding meeting of the Generation of ’27 held in Seville in December 1927, under the pretext of the third centenary of the death of Góngora, also included an uninhibited celebration and a long hangover. Federico García Lorca took an active part in the festivities.

The estate of the patron of the gathering, the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, in Pino Montano, was the meeting place. Ignacio paid for a lunch for sixty people at the Real Venta de Antequera (flamenco eggs, fried fish and oxtail) and then invited them to a party “in style” at his estate.

Celebration of Góngora's tercentenary at the Seville Athenaeum in December 1927. From left to right: Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Juan Chabás, Mauricio Bacarisse, José María Romero Martínez (president of the literature section of the Athenaeum), Manuel Blasco Garzón (president of the Seville Athenaeum), Jorge Guillén, José Bergamín, Dámaso Alonso and Gerardo Diego.
Celebration of Góngora’s tercentenary at the Seville Athenaeum in December 1927. From left to right: Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Juan Chabás, Mauricio Bacarisse, José María Romero Martínez (president of the literature section of the Athenaeum), Manuel Blasco Garzón (president of the Seville Athenaeum), Jorge Guillén, José Bergamín, Dámaso Alonso and Gerardo Diego.

The guests appeared in Arabic garb and a celebration ensued in which Dámaso Alonso recited from memory the 1,091 verses of The First Solitude; the poet and cattle rancher Fernando Villalón tried to hypnotize Alberti; García Lorca improvised fragments of plays. Those present participated in a kind of poetic jousting that pitted local poets against those from abroad. Joaquín Romero Murube performed on the side of the Sevillians along with Luis Cernuda, Fernando Villalón, Adriano del Valle and Rafael Laffón. Federico García Lorca recited a selection of his gypsy ballads. One of those nights they organized, according to Gerardo Diego, “the heroic and nocturnal crossing of the overflowing Betis”. As a finale, they performed Manuel Torre, Niño de Jerez, to whom Federico dedicated in 1931 one of the flamenco vignettes of the Poem of the Deep Song.