About The Book

Newly translated for the first time in ten years, Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is an astonishing depiction of a tumultuous metropolis that changed the course of poetic expression in both Spain and the Americas. Written during Federico García Lorca’s nine months as a student at Columbia University at the beginning of the Great Depression, Poet in New York is widely considered one of the most important books Lorca ever produced. This enduring and influential collection offers us a New York City populated with poverty, racism, social turbulence, and solitude—a New York intoxicating in its vitality and devastating beauty.

After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, poets Pablo Medina and Mark Statman returned to this seventy-year-old work and were struck by how closely it spoke to the atmosphere of New York after the World Trade Center crumbled. They were compelled to create a new English version of Poet in New York—translating the poems with reverence and irreverence, caution and wildness, humility and nerve. They translate Lorca’s words with a contemporary poet’s eye, which allows their work to uphold his surrealistic technique, mesmerizing complexity, and fierce emotion, unlike any other translation to date.

An excellent introduction to one of the most significant figures in twentieth century poetry, Poet in New York is a defining work of modern literature and this new bilingual edition is an exciting exposition of one American city that continues to have the ability to change our perspective on the world around us.

Praise

“Poet in New York is stunning.” —David H. Rosenthal, The New York Times Book Review

“[Poet in New York] may well be one of the greatest books of poems ever written about New York City. . . . A fierce indictment of the modern world incarnated in city life . . . Wildly imaginative . . . An apocalyptic outcry, a dark, instructive, metaphysical bowl of loneliness.” —The New Yorker

“The definitive version of Lorca’s masterpiece, in language that is as alive and molten today as was the original.” —John Ashbery

Excerpt

I
Poemas de la soledad en Columbia University

Furia color de amor,
amor color de olvido.
—Luis Cernuda

I
Poems of Solitude at Columbia University

Fury, the color of love,
love, the color of forgetting.
—Luis Cernuda

Vuelta de Paseo

Asesinado por el cielo,
entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe
y las formas que buscan el cristal,
dejaré crecer mis cabellos.
Con el árbol de muñones que no canta
y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo.
Con los animalitos de cabeza rota
y el agua harapienta de los pies secos.
Con todo lo que tiene cansancio sordomudo
y mariposa ahogada en el tintero.
Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día.
¡Asesinado por el cielo!