Poet in New York
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Brisa y alcohol en las ruedas.
Iré a Santiago.
Mi coral en la tiniebla.
Iré a Santiago.
El mar ahogado en la arena.
SON OF BLACKS IN CUBA
When the full moon comes
I’ll go to Santiago de Cuba.
I’ll go to Santiago.
In a coach of black water.
I’ll go to Santiago.
The palm roofs will sing.
I’ll go to Santiago.
When the palm tree wants to be a stork.
I’ll go to Santiago.
And when the plantain wants to be medusa.
I’ll go to Santiago.
With the blond head of Fonseca.
I’ll go to Santiago.
And the rose of Romeo and Juliet.
I’ll go to Santiago.
Sea of paper and coins of silver.
I’ll go to Santiago.
O Cuba, O rhythm of dry seeds!
I’ll go to Santiago.
O hot waist and drop of wood!
I’ll go to Santiago.
Harp of living trunks, caiman, flower of tobacco!
I’ll go to Santiago.
I always said I would go to Santiago
in a coach of black water.
I’ll go to Santiago.
Breeze and alcohol on the wheels.
I’ll go to Santiago.
My coral in the gloom.
I’ll go to Santiago.
The sea drowned in sand.
Iré a Santiago.
Calor blanco, fruta muerta.
Iré a Santiago.
¡O bovino frescor de cañavera!
¡O Cuba! ¡O curva de suspiro y barro!
Iré a Santiago.
I’ll go to Santiago.
White heat, dead fruit.
I’ll go to Santiago.
O bovine freshness of sugar cane!
O Cuba! O curve of sighs and clay!
I’ll go to Santiago.
Acknowledgments
As translators, we wish to thank los herederos of Federico García Lorca for their generosity. Elaine Markson, our agent, and Gary Johnson, her assistant, provided invaluable encouragement and expertise. Elisabeth Schmitz and Grove/Atlantic showed unwavering faith in the project from the very beginning. We are grateful for the support of of our colleagues at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Beth Vogel, Katherine Koch, Karen Koch, Pablo Medina, Sr., and Ron Padgett read parts of the manuscript and offered helpful and timely suggestions. Also helpful was Edward Hirsch, who wrote the Foreword. The Black Mountain Institute provided invaluable administrative support. The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts provided a residency for Mark Statman. We are also grateful to the members and staff of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs for their interest and their response to this project. The careful work of our editorial associates, Carolina Baffi and Lara Tucker, aided us greatly with the preparation of the manuscript.
Notes on the Poems
On repetition: Lorca’s use of repetition has two sources. The first can be found in his fondness for and studious attention to old lyrical forms such as the medieval romances, or ballads, the Moorish khassidas and ghazals, and the flamenco music he heard as a child in Andalusia. The second source is rooted in his abilities as a dramatist and his penchant for highly stylized melodrama in which repetition has both structural and emotive functions. Lorca often reaches for such effects in Poet in New York by repeating certain words (ay, amor, etc.). On occasion, we have chosen to cut down on the repetition for the sake of compactness and directness, both qualities that are paramount in contemporary poetry. For example: in “King of Harlem” Lorca repeats “Negros. Negros. Negros.” The repetition in Spanish calls the reader’s attention to the people and to his own sense of how to name a people and community, but it can sound highly artificial and clunky in English, not unlike the sound made by a car with a flat tire. The single “Blacks” here is meant to avoid these problems by maximizing the naming and minimizing the rhetorical excess.
On Ay and Ay de mi. These are difficult to translate. Ay can be read as oh or woe and Ay de mi as woe is me. But the Spanish Ay is almost sublingual, a more heartfelt cry than the English oh and Ay de mi does not have the anachronistic or superficial theatricality of woe is me. We have left them in the Spanish to get the full sense of a situation’s emotional urgency, anxiety, confusion, etc., and in deference to Lorca’s masterful handling of melodrama in critical moments in the poems.
The Generation of 1927 usually refers to a group of poets who rose to prominence in the mid-late 1920s. It is so named after a symposium held in Granada celebrating the tricentennial of the death of Góngora (1627), a poet much admired by these young writers, Lorca among them, and to distinguish them from the Generation of ’98, which included Unamuno, Machado, Ortega y Gasset, and other prominent writers. Occasionally the label is extended to a larger group of artists who were affiliated with the younger poets (Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel). Lorca often refers to or quotes directly the work of his contemporaries in his poems.
Notes on the poems: Poet in New York
Carlos Morla Lynch (1885–1968) Chilean diplomat
Bebe Morla, married to Carlos Morla
Luis Cernuda (1902–1963) Spanish poet, “Generation of 1927”
Back from a Walk
Árbol de muñones refers literally to a tree that has had all its branches sheared off so that that only the trunk can be seen. We decided to translate the phrase as “limbless tree” emphasizing the absence of branches rather than the presence of stumps, for sound and also because the word muñón has no direct English equivalent.
1910
Lorca often told people he was born in 1900 (and not 1898) to suggest that he was a poet of the twentieth century. The age often represents for Lorca the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood (like Blake’s movement from innocence to experience).
Your Infancy in Mentón
The translation challenge here is with the sin ti que no te entiende, literally “without you that doesn’t understand you,” which we have translated as “fails to understand you” for Lorca’s meaning and the line’s music.
II. The Blacks
In the music, dance, and the living conditions of the Harlem community, Lorca senses a liveliness he empathizes with. He identifies with the apparently marginalized, those who are secretly disguised but still powerful spiritually (the king, for example) and who are known to those who know the signs.
Ángel del Río (1901–1962), Spanish writer and critic. A friend of Lorca in New York, he was a popular professor of Spanish at Columbia University.
The King of Harlem
Manzana, more commonly understood as apple, also has the meaning of street or block, with a sense of community and neighborhood.
Abandoned Church
see Jewish Cemetery
III. Streets and Dreams
Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (1912–1937), secretary and lover of Lorca; he died fighting with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984), Spanish poet, “Generation of 27,” Nobel Prize for Literature 1977.
Landscape of the Vomiting Crowd
Lorca visited Coney Island in December 1929, not in summer. Therefore, the scene here is an imagined one.
Murder
A display of Lorca the playwright, creating a dramatic situation based on an overheard conversation.
Birth of Christ
Translation of form by transposing form: Lorca writes here in Spanish Alexandrines, that is, fourteen-syllable lines divided by a caesura, or pause, into two hemistichs, or seven-syllable segments. Such syllabic length is nearly unmanageable in English and so we have resorted to a ten-syllable line in the translation.
IV. Poems of Lake Eden Mills
Eduardo Ugarte (1901–1955) Spanish writer and film director.
Double Poem of Lake Eden
Garcilaso de la Vega (ca 1501–1536) Spanish poet and soldier. Highly influenced by Italian literature, especially the pastoral tradition, he is considered one of the first Spanish poets to bring the humanism of the Renaissance to Spanish letters.
V. In the Farmer’s Cabin
Concha Méndez (1898–1986) Spanish poet and editor, married to Manuel Altolaguirre.
Manuel Altolaguirre (1905–1959) Spanish poet and editor, “Generation of 27,” married to Concha Méndez.
The Boy Stanton
Here Lorca writes about the transition between youth and adolescence (the cancer) and emerging questions of sex, love, and identity (see note on 1910).
Girl Drowned in the Well
There was no girl who drowned while Lorca was visiting Newburgh. He is incorporating a memory of a story told when he was a boy in Granada.
The translation questions in this poem were connected with the repeated clause “Que no desemboca,” which we have translated using the negative participle: “Not flowing.” The idea here is to suggest the well as the antithesis of the Heraklitean river, with not-so-subtle suggestions of Jorge Manrique’s “Coplas ”: “Nuestras vidas son los ríos que van a dar a la mar.” (Our lives are the rivers that flow out to sea.)
VI. Introduction to Death
Rafael Sánchez Ventura (1897–1984), Spanish professor of art history.
Nocturne of the Hole
“Nocturno del hueco” has usually been translated as “Nocturne of the Void” or “Nocturne of Emptiness.” By translating hueco as “hole” we are being literal and charging the English version with the sexuality Lorca intended in his original.
Landscape with Two Tombs and an Assyrian Dog see Jewish Cemetery
Ruin
Regino Sainz de la Maza (1896–1981) Spanish musician.
We were struck by the simple and stark connection of this poem to 9/11. Here the poet begins to emerge as a kind of oracle, a role he will take on with greater intensity in the poems that follow.
Moon and Panorama of the Insects
José de Espronceda (1808–1842) Spanish Romantic poet.
VII. Return to the City
New York: Office and Denunciation
Fernando Vela (1888–1966) Spanish critic.
The poet’s oracular voice grows. He offers himself as a sacrifice to be eaten by the crushed cows.
Jewish Cemetery
In Abandoned Church, Lorca writes from the point of view of a parent. In Landscape with Two Tombs and an Assyrian Dog, he writes from the point of view of a friend. In Jewish Cemetery, he writes from the point of view of a spiritual visionary. The progression is consistent with the book’s movement from chronicle to prophecy.
Sombrero de copa is literally a top hat. Lorca is referring, though, not to formal wear but to the hats worn by Hassidic Jews.
Small Infinite Poem and Crucifixion
These two poems were lost and not found until 1950. Several of Lorca’s letters to friends reveal that he intended them for inclusion in Poet in New York, though he did not specify their exact placement in the book. We have included them here because they fit with the growing role of the poet as spiritual visionary evidenced in this section.
VIII. Two Odes
These represent the dramatic high point of the poet’s journey, the poet as one who will not just denounce, not just sacrifice himself, but will speak for those who can’t speak for themselves. This is a far cry from the poet who doesn’t recognize his face, who is murdered by the sky, who is nostalgic for the childhood and can’t admit love. Here Lorca is pronouncing to the world and longing for “the arrival of the kingdom of grain.” These two poems, the most ambitious of the book, announce a Lorca who will be much in evidence when he returns to Spain from New York.
IX. Flight from New York
The waltzes, simple and playful, move toward civilization, which the city doesn’t represent. Rather, think childhood and nature dancing around each other.
X. The Poet Arrives in Havana
Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) Cuban ethnologist and musicologist, the first to recognize and highlight the importance of African elements in Cuban culture.
Son of Blacks in Cuba
Lorca is using the term son broadly here to mean tune or song, rather than specifically to refer to the type of Cuban music called son (the precursor of salsa), popularized in the last decade by the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. The poem in structure and refrain more closely resembles rumba, another type of Cuban music, which had its origins among the blacks in the barrios of Santiago de Cuba.
Lorca almost certainly meant to evoke the very Cuban cañaveral, meaning sugarcane field instead of cañavera, meaning reed-grass.
Luis Cardoza y Aragón (1904–1992) One of the most important Guatemalan poets of his time, rivaled in stature only by the Nobelist Miguel Ángel Asturias.
Further Reading
Guillermo Díaz-Plaja. Federico García Lorca (Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1954).
Daniel Eisenberg. “Poeta en Nueva York; historia y problemas de un texto de Lorca” (Biblioteca Virtual, Miguel de Cervantes, 1975).
Federico García Lorca. In Search of Duende, edited by Christopher Maurer (New Directions, New York, 1955, 1998).
———— . Obras Completas, edited by Arturo del Hoyo with notes by Arturo del Hoyo, Jorge Guillén, and Vicente Aleixandre. (Aguilar, Madrid, 1980).
———— . Libro de poemas, Poema del cante jondo, Romancero gitano, Poeta en Nueva York, Odas, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Bodas de sangre, Yerma, prólogo de Salvador Novo (Editorial Porrúa, Mexico, 1989).
———— . Poeta en Nueva York, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Diván del Tamarit (Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1972).
———— . Poet in New York, translated by Ben Belitt, introduction by Ángel del Río (Grove, New York, 1955).
———— . Poet in New York, translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White, edited and with an introduction by Christopher Maurer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1998).
———— and Salvador Dalí. Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí, edited by Christopher Maurer (Swan Isle Press, Chicago, 2004).
Isabel García Lorca. Recuerdos míos (Tusquets Editores, Barcelona, 2002).
Ian Gibson. Federico García Lorca: A Life (Pantheon, New York, 1989).
———— . Lorca’s Granada: A Practical Guide (Faber & Faber, London, 1992).
Edward Hirsch. The Demon and the Angel (Harcourt, San Diego & New York, 2002).
Leslie Stainton. Lorca: A Dream of Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1999).