Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
