Lorca: Selected Poems
Bilingual Spanish-English edition
After Lorca's murder at the hands of Fascist partisans in 1936, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain.
This new edition of Merryn Williams’ iconic translation of Lorca was the first to include English translations of his last poems, the Sonnets of Dark Love.
Those late poems were lost for decades, possibly due to family concerns that they suggested homosexual leanings.
Original edition sold 12,000 copies in the UK before copyright dispute prevented further reprints.
Dual-language Spanish-English edition.
Each period of Lorca’s poetry has its own separate introduction.
Draws on full range of Lorca’s poetry, from the early poems and the gypsy ballads to the agitated Poet in New York sequence and the Arab-influenced gacelas and casidas which followed his American exile.
Includes the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Lorca’s great elegy for his bullfighter friend.
Includes full text of Lorca’s famous lecture on the duende, the daemon of Spanish music, song, dance, poetry and art.
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), Spain's greatest modern poet and dramatist, was murdered by Fascist partisans shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was by then and immensely popular figure, celebrated throughout the spanish-soeaking world, and at the height of his creative powers. After his death, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain.The manuscript of Lorca's last poems, his tormented Sonnets of Dark Love, disappeared during the Civil War. For fifty years the poems lived only in the words of the poets who had heard Lorca read them, like Neruda and Aleixandre, who remembered them as 'a pure and ardent monument to love in which the prime material is now the poet's flesh, his heart, his soul wide open to his own destruction'. Lorca's lost sonnets were re-discovered in Spain during the 1980s, and the Bloodaxe edition of his Selected Poems (1992; new edition 2021), translated by Merryn Williams, was the first to include English translations of these brooding poems.
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