Description

Green Linden Press, paperback

Translated by: Rebecca Seiferle

Publication Date: November 01, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Of Federico Garca Lorca, translator Rebecca Seiferle writes, There are few Spanish poets who have so captured the English speakers imagination, and yet we continue to read Lorca as we have read him, which is to say through the filters of our own assumptions. Similarly, previous translations have gone in pursuit of surrealism or music or romanticism at the expense of the sharp clarity and elemental intelligence of the original. Breathtaking in its versatility, Lorcas poetry conveys the sense that there are many Lorcas, but elusive, a play of presence and absence. For Lorca, fluidity and evasion are essential to the truth of poetry. His deep anguish, his performative masques, his sense of difference and his identification with those also marginalized, his sense of the interpenetration of absence and presence, all begin to interconnect if viewed from a queered center. These translations seek only the original, its deep intelligence, where a phrase can convey what Lorca called duende, an elusive something else that evades all definition, a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained the spirit of the earth.