ABSTRACT
Roland Barthes's theorization of French cultural specificity, in the well-known but not particularly well-studied essay "The Grain of the Voice", offers a suggestive parallel to the performance of Spanish exceptionalism in Federico Garcia Lorca's "Juego y teoria del duende". His concept of the "grain", like Lorca's duende, is at once highly personal and seductively universalizable. Since Barthes is proposing an aesthetic criterion intimately connect to his own libidinal relation to the French language, the concept of the grain is untranslatable, untransferable to other cultural contexts. "The Grain of the Voice" is one of the few essays that Barthes dedicated to lyric poetry, but it is "about" poetry only in a very specific sense. The link between performative poetics and cultural nationalism is strong for both Lorca and Barthes. Lorca's performative legacy persists in three major Spanish poets of the second half of the twentieth century who continue to work within paradoxical framework: Antonio Gamoneda, Claudio Rodriguez, and Jose Angel Valente.
