Poet in New York

“Lorca’s long out-of-print poetic sequence about New York City, newly translated in this bilingual edition, is as contemporary as today’s headlines: slums, racism, violence, and cries of loneliness punctuate this verse. Written during the Spanish playwright’s nine-month stopover in 1929-30, and steeped in surrealistic technique, [this] unrelentingly negative antihymn reads the urban condition as symbolic of our culture’s materialistic corruption of love and its degradation of nature … This [edition] is accompanied by Lorca’s letters and a lecture he delivered on this lyrical work.“—”Publishers Weekly “
”[This] is one of the perplexing classics of 20th-century poetry. It is a difficult, sometimes bewildered, often hermetic work. It is elusive and enigmatic, mysterious, tortured—a book, to borrow one of the poet’s own phrases, ‘that can baptize in dark water all who look at it.’ Reading it in [this] convincing new translation … one feels the anguished authority an

Federico García Lorca was born into an educated family of small landowners in Fuente Vaqueros in 1898. A poet, dramatist, musician, and artist, he attended the university at Granada, where he acquired a fine knowledge of literature.

In 1919, he went to the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. During his long stay there, he met all the principal writers, critics, and scholars who visited the place, which was then a flourishing center of cultural liberalism. In 1928, his Gipsy-Ballad Book (Romancero gitano) received much public acclaim.

In 1929, he went to New York. His volume of poems Poet in New York (Poeta en Nueva York) was published posthumously in 1940.

On his return to republican Spain, he devoted himself to the theatre as co-director of La Barraca, a government-sponsored student theatrical company that toured the country. He wrote fewer poems, but these include his masterpiece Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, 1935), a lament for a dead bullfighter. He wrote classical plays, pantomimic interludes, and puppet plays, including La zapatera prodigiosa (1930), and three tragedies: Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre, 1933), Yerma (1934), and The House of Bernarda Alba (La casa de Bernarda Alba, 1936).

Just after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he was murdered at Granada by Nationalist partisans in mysterious circumstances.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.