Poet in New York
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A newly revised edition of the insightful poetic cycle by one of the key figures of modern literature
Written while Federico García Lorca was a student at Columbia University in 1929–30, Poet in New York is one of the most important books he 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.
Timed to coincide with the citywide celebration of García Lorca in New York planned for 2013, this edition, which has been revised once again by the renowned García Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer, includes thrilling material—new photographs, new and emended letters—that has only recently come to light. Complementing these additions are García Lorca's witty and insightful letters 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 that accompany those letters, a prose poem, extensive notes, and an interpretive lecture by García Lorca himself.
An excellent introduction to the work of a key figure of modern poetry, this bilingual edition of Poet in New York, a strange, timeless, vital book of verse, is also an exposition of the American city in the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The great Spanish modernist Garc a Lorca (1898 1936) didn't much like the Big Apple: depressed by the grime, the crowds and the tall new buildings, aghast at American capitalism with its big winners and its destitute losers, uneasy with his identity as a gay man, fascinated (and sometimes repelled) by street culture in Harlem and homesick for his native Andalusia, he turned his year at Columbia University in 1929 30 into some of the fiercest, unhappiest and strangest poems of the century. This facing-page translation inspired, the translators say, by 9/11 preserves the oddities and the angers in Lorca's metaphor-loaded free verse. The famous "Ode to Walt Whitman" salutes the "Fairies of North America,/ Pajaros of Havana," hoping against hope to resist self-hate. Interludes in Vermont and a coda in Cuba suggest the mystical ties with nature that Lorca could not find in Manhattan. Yet the dominant note is a brilliant hostility: at "Dawn in New York," "furious swarms of coins/ drill and devour the abandoned children." The Chrysler Building suggests "a million iron workers/ forging chains for the children to come." Lorca's power, and the translators' fidelity, make this a worthy new version of a 20th-century classic.
