Federico García Lorca is admired the world over for the lyricism, immediacy, and beauty of his poetry. The superb translators of this collection — Stephen Spender, Langston Hughes, Ben Belitt, William Jay Smith, and W. S. Merwin — have produced English versions that catch the spirit and intensity of the originals. Presented bilingually, this is a selection of Lorca’s very best.

The notion of “duende” became a cornerstone of Federico García Lorca’s poetics over the course of his career. In his lecture “Play and Theory of the Duende,” he says, “there are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned…” The duende is portrayed by Lorca as a demonic earth spirit embodying irrationality, earthiness, and a heightened awareness of death.…

In The Green Morning: Memories of Federico, Francisco García Lorca tells of the charmed childhood he, his sisters, and his older brother, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, spent in the “quiet, very fragrant” Andalusian village of Fuente Vaqueros. Digressions into family history enable us to see Federico, the son of a well-off landowning family with a tradition of literacy, poetry-writing, and musical accomplishment—as the culmination of a particular family type his brother describes as “happy, spontaneous, and instinctive.…

This first English-language edition of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Selected Letters presents an intimate autobiographical record of the Spanish poet from the age of twenty to a month before his death at the hands of Franco’s forces in 1936. “I was born for my friends,” Lorca wrote to Melchor Fernández Almagro in 1926, and these letters reveal the personality his friends found so magical. (“A happiness, a brilliance…” Pablo Neruda called him.…

Federico Garcia Lorca called The Public “the best thing I’ve written for the theater.” Yet, he acknowledged, “this is for the theater years from now.” Now, half a century later, The Public and another of Lorca’s most daring works, Play without a Title, are available in English translation for the first time. Surrealism, folk theater, poetry, vivid costumes, black humor––in the The Public, dramatic traditions are ransacked to develop themes as timely in the 1980s as they were taboo when Lorca was writing: if Romeo were a man of thirty and Juliet a boy of fifteen, would their passion be any less authentic?…

A special aspect of Federico Garcia Lorca’s personality was the ease with which he made friends with children and the delight he took in entertaining them. In addition to the little puppet shows he created for his sisters and their friends and for the children of other writers, he wrote many little poems as well as words set to folk tunes that are still read and sung by Spanish children today and which, in their rarity and charm, are just the right size for anyone of any age.…

A collection of prose writing and lectures from the great Spanish poet.

Federico García Lorca’s position as one of the few geniuses of the modern theatre was firmly established in the English-speaking world with his Three Tragedies. Here, with an introduction by the dramatist’s brother, Francisco García Lorca, are five of his “comedies,” in the authorized translations, extensively revised to reflect recent Lorca scholarship and to convey the sparkle, freshness, and magic of the original Spanish. The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife tells of a young beauty married to an old man, a theme that often concerned Lorca.…

Here in the authorized translation by James Graham-Lujan and Richard L. O’Connell, with an illuminating biographical introduction by the poet’s brother, Francisco García Lorca, are three tragic dramas by the great modern Spanish poet and playwright which have caught the imagination and won the critical acclaim of the literate world: Blood Wedding: Concerned with love that cannot become marriage among the primitive hill people of Castile, this is a play of the workings of tremendous passions and tribal ritual toward an inescapable tragic end.…