Poet in New York

by García Lorca, Federico; Maurer, Christopher; Simon, Greg; White, Steven F.

• ISBN13: 9780374525408
• ISBN10: 0374525404
• Edition: Bilingual
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-06-24
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Written while Federico Garciacute;a Lorca was a student at Columbia University in 1929-30,Poet in New Yorkis one of the most important books Lorca produced, and certainly one of the most important books ever published about New York City. Indeed, it is a book that changed the direction of poetry in both Spain and the Americas, a pathbreaking and defining work of modern literature. In honor of the poet's centenary, the celebrated Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer has revised this strange, timeless, and vital book of verse, using much previously unavailable or untranslated material: Lorca's own manuscript of the entire book; witty and insightful letters from the poet to his family describing his feelings about America and his temporary home there (a dorm room in Columbia's John Jay Hall); the annotated photographs which accompany those letters; and a prose poem missing from previous editions. Complementing these new addtions are extensive notes and letters, revised versions of all the poems, and an interpretive lectures by Lorca himself. An excellent introduction to the work of one of the key figures of modern poetry, this bilingual edition ofPoet in New Yorkis also a thrilling exposition of the American city in the 20th century. Federico Garcia Lorca, born in Granada in 1898, is widely seen as Spain's greatest modern poet. Among his best-known books areThe Divan at Tamarit,Poet in New York, andThe Gypsy Ballads. He was murdered by Franco's soldiers in 1936. Written while Federico Garcia Lorca was a student at Columbia University in 1929-30,Poet in New Yorkis one of the most important books Lorca produced, and certainly one of the most important books ever published about New York City. Indeed, it is a book that changed the direction of poetry in both Spain and the Americas, a pathbreaking and defining work of modern literature. In honor of the poet's centenary, the celebrated Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer has revised this strange, timeless, and vital book of verse, using much previously unavailable or untranslated material: Lorca's own manuscript of the entire book; witty and insightful letters from the poet to his family describing his feelings about America and his temporary home there (a dorm room in Columbia's John Jay Hall); the annotated photographs which accompany those letters; and a prose poem missing from previous editions. Complementing these new addtions are extensive notes and letters, revised versions of all the poems, and an interpretive lectures by Lorca himself. An excellent introduction to the work of one of the key figures of modern poetry, this bilingual edition ofPoet in New Yorkis also a thrilling exposition of the American city in the 20th century. "[This] is one of the perplexing classics of 20th-century poetry. It is a difficult, sometimes bewildered, often hermetic work. It is elusive and enigmatic, mysterious, tortured--a book, to borrow one of the poet's own phrases, 'that can baptize in dark water all who look at it.' Reading it in [this] convincing new translation . . . one feels the anguished authority and the demonic force and impact of the original. For all its strangeness, Lorca's testament may well be one of the greatest books of poems ever written about New York City--second, perhaps, only to Walt Whitman's powerful embrace of the American megalopolis . . . [Poet in New York] is a fierce indictment of the modern world incarnated in city life, but it is also a wildly imaginative and joyously alienated declaration of residence--an apocalyptic outcry, a dark, instructive, metaphysical bowl of loneliness."--The New Yorker "In its orchestration of peaks and valleys, of introspection and of the cruelty of modern industrial life,Poet in New Yorkis stunning. Though it initially

Author Biography

Federico García Lorca is one of Spain's greatest poets and dramatists. He was born in a village near Granada in 1898 and was murdered in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Note to the Second Edition
After a Walk	p. 5
1910 (Intermezzo)	p. 7
Fable of Three Friends to Be Sung in Rounds	p. 9
Your Childhood in Menton	p. 15
Standards and Paradise of the Blacks	p. 21
The King of Harlem	p. 25
Abandoned Church (Ballad of the Great War)	p. 35
Dance of Death	p. 41
Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude (Dusk at Coney Island)	p. 49
Landscape of a Pissing Multitude (Battery Place Nocturne)	p. 53
Murder (Two Early Morning Voices on Riverside Drive)	p. 57
Christmas on the Hudson	p. 59
Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne)	p. 63
Blind Panorama of New York	p. 67
The Birth of Christ	p. 71
Dawn	p. 73
Double Poem of Lake Eden	p. 77
Living Sky	p. 81
Little Stanton	p. 87
Cow	p. 93
Little Girl Drowned in the Well (Granada and Newburgh)	p. 95
Death	p. 101
Nocturne of Emptied Space	p. 103
Landscape with Two Graves and an Assyrian Dog	p. 111
Ruin	p. 113
Two Lovers Murdered by a Partridge	p. 117
Moon and Panorama of the Insects (Love Poem)	p. 123
New York (Office and Denunciation)	p. 133
Jewish Cemetery	p. 139
Crucifixion	p. 145
Cry to Rome (From the Tower of the Chrysler Building)	p. 151
Ode to Walt Whitman	p. 157
Little Viennese Waltz	p. 169
Waltz in the Branches	p. 173
Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms	p. 179
Lecture: A Poet in New York	p. 183
The Poet Writes to His Family from New York and Havana	p. 203
Notes on the Poems	p. 287
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