Poet in New York: A Bilingual Edition

John Ashbery blurbs this translation of Poet in New York with, "Pablo Medina and Mark Statman have produced the definitive version of Lorca's masterpiece, in language that is as alive and molten today as was the original in 1930." I couldn't agree more, and happen to think that quote says it all. This translation is true to the Spanish, translated pretty much literally, while still maintaining the poetics, stylings, and spirit of Lorca. If you have to read the poems in English, highly recommend this translation. There's really nothing more to be said.

This is a great book with very good translations of Lorca's most surreal poetry. I would recommend it to anyone.

Federico Garcia Lorca arrived in New York just in time to witness the chaos created by the 1929 stock market crash. Lorca was totally unprepared for what he found in New York, as Pablo Medina and Mark Statman point out in their excellent and thrilling new translation of "Poet in New York": "Coming to rid himself of grief, he encounters an abundance of grief; coming to witness the power of human endeavor, he finds inhumanity, tragedy, failure." From this extreme culture shock poured the phantasmagoric poems of "Poet in New York," in this bilingual edition featuring both Lorca's originals and Medina and Statman's fine, faithful, idiomatic translations. This was the first translation of "Poet in New York" to be done after the tragedy of 9/11, published early in 2008; what Medina and Statman couldn't foresee, however, was how the current Wall Street meltdown--the worst since 1929--would further underline the pertinence and urgency of Lorca's apocalyptic vision of the city. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers and WaMu, these lines from "Dance of Death" sound as if Lorca could have written them for a CNN report: In time the cobra will hiss in the final floors, the nettles shake patios and porches, the Market become a pyramid of moss, the reeds follow the rifles, and soon, very soon. Oh, Wall Street!

After reading "Poeta en Nueva York" I found out that it was really worth learning spanish. I am not exaggerating but some of Lorca's verses make me cry. They have so much emotion and fantasy in them, and they talk about experiences that take place deep inside me. The poems are surrealist but that is also what makes them amazing. The best poem is probably "Fabula y Rueda de Los Tres Amigos" where Lorca beautifully conveys his feelings towards his relationships with others and the struggle he sees within them. Strangely enough at the end of the poem he describes a lot of events concerning his death which actually coincided with his murder a few years later. Lorca's relation with the moon reflected through his simple yet overwhelming words is also charming and inspiring. I discovered through them that there was a lot more in that celestial body orbiting the earth than what I used to see before. You will feel that poetry is just flowing out of Federico. He didn't to exert a lot of effort to sound that marvellous and that right.

After reading "A Poet in New York," I can say this much: "I don't think I am planning a trip to New York very soon." Lorca's account of the city was so visceral, raw and cruel, I could feel the hauntingly dead interactions between people, and those people's relationships to the material world around them. The accounts of violence in the streets are equally as cold and boldly unapologetic as his observations of the early morning hours when the city is first waking up. Gabriel Garcia Lorca truly shows that when it comes to the movements as a city with ties to industry, capitalistic gain and material wealth, there is no division between the life of the human being and the life of the machine. There is almost an automated, "conveyor belt" feeling to the mechanical movement of life in the city. As soon as energy is poured into an endeavor, it is also poured out just as easily. People are as disposable as sheet metal. Their blood, their organs and their instruments of movement could be ripped away and demolished as quickly and non-emotionally as one would destroy the framework of a building and it would be of no concern to anyone else. I believe that Lorca's observations and journal entries are a reflection of not only the mindset of one of the most well known cities in the world, applicable to the 1930s, but is also quite accurately a reflection of the state of the world today.