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Poema del cante jondo and Romancero Gitano, the books of poems that Lorca wrote first, out of his excited response to gypsy music, poetry and dance all around him in Granada, contain some of his most powerful and trenchant lyrical work, original, inimitable, daring, and a clear expression of the duende, the Dionysian daemon in poetry, of which he wrote eloquently. A new, fresh, consistent translation—and Mr. Angel's is all of these—is a welcome return to that wild dance, in English.
—W.S. Merwin
Luckily for all of us, many of the images, intimations and signs that Lorca left behind wait patiently here in the pages of this book. They are remarkably intact and moving, considering the great age of the subject matter, presented in the powerful language of translation by Ralph Angel, another poet who cannot stop listening. He has revealed the many incidental felicities of Lorca’s lyrics in a sensitive and seductive way, and called forth an unforgettable, bone-chilling evocation of the poet’s timeless Andalusian voice.
—Greg Simon, from the Introduction
Cante jondo. Deep Song. A poem meant to be sung, not with a pretty voice but with a cry, to break the silence and stillness of the body. A rustic form of flamenco. A poem written to remind Spain of its deep musical soul, the primitive song of the Andalusian Gypsies. A poem by Federico García Lorca written in 1921 when he was only twenty-three and had but fifteen years left to live before the Franco regime murdered him in the hills of Granada.
Translator Ralph Angel returns to Lorca’s strange, unique rhythms and to the irrational, intuitive duende. This incantatory translation, every bit as revolutionary as the original was almost a century before, reconfirms what Lorca said of this work, that it is “a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice. . . [that] makes the tightly closed flowers of the semitones blossom into a thousand petals.”
Federico García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, near the city of Granada on June 5, 1898. One of Spain’s most acclaimed poets and playwrights, he was also an accomplished artist and musician. As a young man, Lorca studied philosophy, literature, and law. He achieved prominence for his poetry in the 1920s with the publication of his works Libra de poemas (1921) and Romancero gitano (1928). Although Lorca wrote Poema del cante jondo in 1921, the collection was not published until 1931. Lorca’s best-known volume of poetry, Poet in New York, which reflected his time in depression-era New York City, was published after his death in 1940. At the onset of the Spanish Civil War, in August of 1936, the outspoken Lorca was arrested, executed without trial by Franco nationalists, and buried in an unmarked grave at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Ralph Angel is the author of four books of poetry: Anxious Latitudes; Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; Twice Removed; and Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986 2006; as well as a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song.
His poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the 2003 Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association.
Mr. Angel is Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Los Angeles.
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