Poet in Spain

Book excerpt: For the first time in a quarter century, a major new volume of translations of the beloved poetry of Federico García Lorca, presented in a beautiful bilingual edition The fluid and mesmeric lines of these new translations by the award-winning poet Sarah Arvio 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 and the play Blood Wedding--also a great tragic poem. Arvio has created a fresh voice for Lorca in English, full of urgency, pathos, and lyricism--showing the poet's work has grown only more beautiful with the passage of time.