Federico García Lorca, Christopher Maurer (Edited by), Christopher Maurer (Introducer), Greg Simon (Translator), Steven F White (Translator)

Poet in New York

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Summary

'There has been no more terribly acute critic of America than this steel-conscious and death-conscious Spaniard, with his curious passion for the modernities of nickel and tinfoil and nitre . . .' So wrote Conrad Aiken of Lorca's violent response to the New York he encountered as a student at Columbia University in 1929 and 1930. Born and brought up in Andalusia, Lorca's reaction to the brutality and loneliness of the vast city was one of amazement and indignation. His poetry moved away from the lyricism of the early Romanceros and became a vehicle for experimental techniques through which he expressed tortured feelings of alienation and dislocation. Based on a new edition of the original text, Greg Simon's and Steven White's new translation brings to life Lorca's arresting imagery. Christopher Maurer, a leading authority on Lorca's work, provides an enlightening introduction placing Poet in New York in context, and there are translations of Lorca's letters as well as a lecture he gave about the work. Illustrated with archive photographs, this comprehensive volume will make Lorca's masterpiece available to a whole new generation of readers.

About the author

Federico García Lorca

Poet, playwright, musician and artist, close friend of the great Surrealists Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca was one of the most distinctive and beloved writers of modern times. His writing has inspired generations of writers and artists, from Pablo Neruda to Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith.

Born in Andalusia, Spain, in 1898, Lorca studied in Madrid as a young man and soon became prominent in artistic circles; in 1928 his book of Gypsy Ballads catapulted him to literary stardom. He escaped to New York for a year in 1929, where he found he was able to focus on his poetry and immerse himself in the thriving gay culture of Harlem; upon returning to republican Spain he became increasingly politicized, devoting himself to radical works of theatre that rebelled against the bourgeois status quo.

Just after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he was murdered at Granada by Nationalist partisans. He was thirty-eight years old.

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