“Pioneer Bilingual Edition of Federico Garcia Lorca’s ‘Poet in New York’ with Unpublished Order of Poems and Notes”

Leonard Cohen adapted his Little Viennese Waltz (« Take This Waltz »). Paul Auster holds it for one of his collections of favorite poems, like Patti Smith. As for Jerome Rothenberg, the American founder of “ethnopoetry”, he took over some of his stanzas to rewrite them according to his inspiration.

Considered the masterpiece of the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), Poet in New York reappears in a new bilingual version. A new translation? Much more than that. It is the very composition of the collection and the order of the poems desired by the author that Zoraida Carandell and Carole Fillière, professors respectively at the universities of Nanterre and Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès, propose for the first time. A form of reparation, eighty-seven years after the death of the writer, assassinated on August 19, 1936 by the Phalangists.

Lorca, whose work was censored in Spain until 1966, wrote the majority of the texts of Poet in New York during a study stay at Columbia University, in 1929 and 1930. Tested by his break with the sculptor Emilio Aladren, he was in search of an aesthetic renewal. In his texts, we read the amazement in front of Manhattan, the loneliness, the call of nature and the return to the city, materialized by Lorca’s departure for Havana. “A kind of travelogue”emphasizes Zoraida Carandell, who dedicated her thesis to him.

But this book had many mysteries. It was only posthumously, and unfinished, that it was published in 1940. Before, the poet had presented his texts, during a reading-conference, in 1932, in Madrid, but, apart from a few poems published in review, he had not had them published in a collection. This was his intention when, on July 13, 1936, in Madrid, he went to the office of his friend and publisher José Bergamin, director of the cultural magazine Cross and Stripe (“cross and line”). In his absence, he deposited there the manuscript of his book: a hybrid set of texts, typewritten, handwritten or printed, as well as notes indicating where to place the missing poems (given by Lorca to friends or published in journals) and illustrations.

In the drawers of a Mexican actress

The poet did not have time to return to explain these instructions. Four days later, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War prompted him to flee to Granada, his hometown, where he believed he was safe. He was executed a month later.

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