For the first time in a quarter century, a major new volume of translations of the beloved poetry of Federico García Lorca, by award-winning poet Sarah Arvio.
The fluid and mesmeric lines of these new translations bring us closer than ever to the talismanic perfection of the great García Lorca: Poet in Spain invokes the "wild, innate, local surrealism" of the Spanish voice, in moonlit poems of love and death set among poplars, rivers, low hills, and high sierras. Arvio's ample and rhythmically rich offering includes, among other essential works, the folkloric yet modernist Gypsy Ballads, the plaintive flamenco Poem of the Cante Jondo, and the turbulent and beautiful Dark Love Sonnets—addressed to Lorca's homosexual lover—which Lorca was revising at the time of his brutal political murder by Fascist forces in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Here, too, are several lyrics translated into English for the first time....