Interview

Of all of Lorca's poems, why did you select his Poem of the Deep Song to translate?



I was drawn to Poema del cante jondo in part because I was drawn to the music it pays homage to, which, strangely and surprisingly, was familiar to my ear. It resembled the incantatory medieval singing of the Sephardic synagogue I grew up in.



On that same note, these poems, being songs, are oral, written to be heard out loud. How has this played into your process of translation?



Though the poems are an homage to cante jondo, they are not songs. They're poems. Cante jondo is highly stylized singing. In each song the cantaor must convey his or her own suffering within the compás of its complex rhythms. And compás is a strange, unique fluidity-full of discrete interruptions, accents, and silences. In Poem of the Deep Song, Lorca did not try to imitate the lyrics or music of cante jondo, but he did, I think, rely on its compás in order to craft poems that would enact the experience of the solitary anguish that is cante jondo. Still, I found that in order to come to terms with these spare, peculiar poems, I had to come to terms with cante jondo, and especially the four palos or genres of Lorca's book: "Poem of the Gypsy Siguiriya," "Poem of the Soleá," "Poem of the Saeta," and "Description of the Petenera." Only by studying cante jondo, and translating lyrics of songs that moved me, and listening to cante jondo at times while I worked, did I begin to hear the strange, subtle rhythms and silences and accents of the poems.



Duende, the Andalusian myth of a mischievous, irrational, intuitive spirit that brings about inspiration, was central to Lorca's creative thought. Goethe once described it as a "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains." Could you talk about this?



In a lecture that Lorca first delivered in Buenos Aires in 1933, he described duende as a "black sound."



"The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet."



"Spain is moved by the duende, for it is a country of ancient music and dance where the duende squeezes the lemons of dawn-a country of death. A country open to death. . . . Everywhere else, death is an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them. Many Spaniards live indoors until the day they die and are taken out into the sunlight. A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man . . . his profile wounds like the edge of a barber's razor."*



*(Lorca quotations taken from Deep Song and Other Prose, trans. Christopher Maurer, New Directions, 1980)