Those themes are what call me back into Lorca’s poetry every so often. In its most fundamental perspective, Lorca’s poetry deals with the universal themes of love, death and alienation. It was from Professor Alonso, himself a poet, that I gained a deeper understanding of Lorca and of Lorca’s works.
Both, also, were part of the group known as the Generation of ’27-a number of poets linked by their explorations with the avant-garde.
Professor Alonso had known Lorca as a friend and colleague starting in their youth when both were students at the progressive Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. My first exposure to it was in the late 1960’s in Madrid where I audited a course on García Lorca’s poetry and theatre taught by Damaso Alonso. This is not my first reading of “Poema del cante jondo”. I do not, as a rule, venture beyond a handful that I encountered among the well known and even then, they lie fallow for years, remembered only in brief reflection and not in a re-reading.Īnd about Lorca’s works-his poetry and his theatre-I am enthusiastic. I have a few poets whom I have read off and on. It is not a genre that I turn to with preference. makes the tightly closed flowers of the semitones blossom into a thousand petals.” This incantatory translation, every bit as revolutionary as the original was almost a century before, reconfirms what Lorca said of this work, that it is “a slammer, a wavering emission of the voice. Translator Ralph Angel returns to Lorca’s strange, unique rhythms and to the irrational, intuitive duende. A poem by Federico García Lorca written in 1921 when he was only twenty-three and had but fifteen years left to live before the Franco regime murdered him in the hills of Granada. A poem written to remind Spain of its deep musical soul, the primitive song of the Andalusian Gypsies. A poem meant to be sung, not with a pretty voice but with a cry, to break the silence and stillness of the body.
Angel’s is all of these-is a welcome return to that wild dance, in this bilingual edition.”-W.S. A new, fresh, consistent translation-and Mr. “ Poema del cante jondo and Romancero Gitano, the books of poems that Lorca wrote first, out of his excited response to gypsy music, poetry, and dance all around him in Granada, contain some of his most powerful and trenchant lyrical work, original, inimitable, daring, and a clear expression of the duende, the Dionysian daemon in poetry, of which he wrote eloquently.
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