Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5,1898; died near Granada, August 19,1936, Garca Lorca is Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poet and dramatist. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of theSpanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excessof political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after theinevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest tothe less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with MACHADO as one ofthe two greatest poets Spain has produced this century, and he is certainlySpain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age. As a poet, his early reputation rested on the Romancero gitano (Madrid, 1928; tr.R. Humphries, The Gypsy Ballads of Garca Lorca, Bloomington, 1953), thepoems of Poema del Cante Jondo (Madrid, 1931), and Llanto por IgnacioSanchez Mejias (Madrid, 1935; tr. A. L. Lloyd, in Lament for the Death of aBullfighter, and Other Poems, London, 1937), all profoundly Andalusian, richlysombre in their mood and imagery, and disquieting in their projection of apart-primitive, part-private world of myth moved by dark and not preciselyidentifiable forces; but, beneath the flamenco trappings, there is a deeper -perhaps personal - anguish, as well as a superb rhythmical and linguistic sense(the Llanto is one of the four best elegies in the Spanish language). Criticalinterest has since shifted to the tortured, ambiguous and deliberately dissonantsurrealist poems of Poeta en Nueva York (Mexico City, 1940; tr. B. Belitt, Poet inNew York, London, 1955), and to the arabesque casidas and gacelas of Diveinde Tamarit (NY, 1940). An early major anthology in English is Poems (tr. S.Spender & J. L. Gili, London, 1939). As a dramatist, early romantic pieces with social implications such as MarianaPineda (Madrid, 1928; tr. J. GrahamLuidn & R. L. O'Connell in Collected Plays,London, 1976) and the comic invention of L...
