Customer Reviews

Poet in New York: A Bilingual Edition

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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!

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

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.