Customer Reviews

Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch

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I bought this book to help me in ongoing research into Lorca's influence on US poets of the Cold War generation. It has repaid my investment many times over. Thank you, Professor Mayhew, for your invaluable guide through the myriad pathways of Lorca's influence.

Mayhew, alert as a caterpillar, knows where, when and who was borrowing from Lorca's style during a dark and dangerous period of US history, plus he has a sense of humor about how awful some of this borrowing turned out to be. If translation is a two way street, then there have been many head on collisions in the name of love. But in general, we get a measured sense of how all of a sudden many of the New Americans were talking about "duende" without really knowing what it is. I understand that I myself, for example, will also never know what it is, as that knowledge is vouchsafed only 1 in every two million US citizens. It is the one thing that most people will never be able to understand. Even in Spain they don't really get it either. I have been working with a Spanish scholar, David Menendez Alvarez, who has steered me towards the instances in which Jack Spicer translated directly from Lorca's poetry, and Menendez Alvarez advised me, why not skip the whole duende thing. But Mayhew shows us how, for one reason or another, and for reasons not entirely divorced from the ongoing crisis of masculinity of the 1950s, the concept of duende became extremely important to this group of poets--mostly men, though Mayhew points out that Denise Levertov, Diane Wakoski, and Hilda Morley wrote with at least a glancing awareness of Lorca.

His list is a long one, but perhaps the most intriguing chapter of Mayhew is the coda, in which he acknowledges that Lorca's influence on US poetics appears to be drawing to a close. Where once everyone from Langston Hughes to Creeley to Frank O'Hara used him as their personal MFA program, today very few poets of note bother with the man. Is this a testament to the never to be underestimated shallowness of our gene pool? Or is there a way in which, once more generally understood, a cult figure's mojo ceases to shine or vibrate? I have also thought that it might be a result of narrowcasting: now that there are actual experts on Lorca in the United States, people who actually know what duende is, the rest of us are just left feeling pretty inadequate. Until that moment, Mayhew has written a book that will stand the test of time, an authoritative survey on a controversial and protean subject, one infinitely twisty like a snake on the Andalusian plain.