“dream of the guitar” ZJC (2008)
One of the draw backs of the book I have put out is that it is not a bilingual edition. It is wholly in English. I am not as knowledgeable as I should be with copyright law but there is debate as to how much of Garcia Lorca’s […]
“federico: another age” ZJC (2008)
I have been working on a version of Federico Garcia Lorca’s famous poem, Romance Sombambule, or, roughly translated, The Sleepwalker Ballad. Several friends have looked at it and said that it was a good attempt. I must give thanks to France Isabelle, Shirley, Mistletoe
and Elle! You all gave […]
So the book is done. There were a few snaggles that occurred along the way. For one, due to the complexities of U.S. copyright law, it is unclear whether all of Federico’s work is covered in the Copyright Term Extension Act or not. Technically, legally, are translations their own entity and the […]
“the myth of sedna” ZJC (2006)
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It is raining in Michigan. It is raining out on the lakes. My dear friend Sedna, with her rich songs of betrayal, death and resurrection, sent me a lament. I have been thinking of laments a […]
“me and pablo neruda in corsica” (1964)
I have been working on a translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s El nino mudo, what I am loosely translating as The voiceless boy. On doing some research on Federico I discovered that in 1933 he met Pablo Neruda in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Later, in Madrid, 1934, he […]
Federico Garcia Lorca was executed in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, by General Franco’s Fascist guard. Shortly before he was shot he wrote a series poems based on a style of Arabic poetry called a casida. The website Andalus, based out of Tangier, Morocco, has this to say on […]
“I am the false dawn among the leaves”
In the second to last scene of the play, Federico turns what has been a fairly realistic play into magical realism. It is the dead of night out in a humid forest. Somewhere in it Leonardo and the Bride are stumbling forward while search parties out […]
bad blood, bad blood
In the second scene of act 2 we see everyone returning back to the Bride’s house after the wedding. A celebration begins with music and dancing, but throughout it the Bride appears agitated and nervous and finally retires to her rooms. Suddenly Leonardo’s Wife tells the Bridegroom that her husband disappeared, but […]
let the bride awake
In the first scene of act 2 we see the Bride and Maid alone; the Maid is getting her mistress ready for the next day and the Bride is complaining about the heat, the Maid and her dead mother’s fate. A knock on the door reveals Leonardo; he talks of his […]
the root of the scream
In the third and final scene in act one, the Mother and the Bridegroom go to the Bride’s house, out in the middle of a barren wasteland, where they meet the Bride’s Maid and her Father. The Father, old, tells the Mother of his dead wife and his desire to see […]
[click] to get the big picture
In the second scene of Act 1 we meet Leonardo and his family. He has married the Bride’s cousin (who is simply called Leonardo’s Wife or just Wife by Federico; who gives everyone titles, not names in this play). The two of them live in a run-down hut […]
“the bride” by ZJC
Around January of this year I began to work on translating Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem-play, Bodas de sangre or better known in the English speaking world as Blood Wedding. I think I got through maybe two scenes in the first act and then, like a lot of my projects (short attention […]
Federico Garcia Lorca states in his essay The Theory and Function of the Duende/«Teoria y Juego del Duende»:
“En cambio, el duende no llega si no ve posibilidad de muerte, si no sabe que ha de rondar su casa, si no tiene seguridad de que ha de mecer esas ramas que todos llevamos y que no […]
[continued from part 2]
The heads that Zurbaran painted, all frozen like the moon; El Greco’s butter yellow and lightning yellow; Father Sigüenza’s narratives; all the work of Goya; the apse in the church of the Escorial; all poly-chromed sculpture; the crypt in the house of the Duke of Oscuna; “Death with a guitar” in the […]
[continued from part 1]
The angel guides and gives gifts like Saint Rafael, defends and avoids like Saint Michael, speaks and forewarns like Saint Gabriel. The angel dazzles. He flies high over our heads shedding grace. It is then we realize effortlessly our work or harmony or dance. The angel that was on the road […]
Friends, today I would like to introduce to you Federico Garcia Lorca’s concept of “the duende,” that is (according to Wiki), “a rarely-explained concept in Spanish art, particularly flamenco, having to do with emotion, expression and authenticity. In fact, ‘tener duende’ can be loosely translated as having soul.”
In 1933, three years before his assassination, Federico […]
Bodas de sangre
Federico Garcia Lorca
Blood Wedding
translated by ZJC
Acto primero, cuadrp tercero
interior de la cueva donde vive la novia. al fondo, una cruz de grandes flores rosa. las puertas, redondas, con cortinajes de encaje y lazos rosa. por las paredes, de material blanco y duro, abanicos redondos, jarros azules y pequeños espejos.
Act 1. Scene 3
interior of […]
Bodas de sangre
Federico Garcia Lorca
Blood Wedding
translated by ZJC
Acto primero, Cuadro segundo
habitación pintada de rosa con cobres y ramos de flores populares. en el centro, una mesa con mantel. es la mañana. suegra de Leonardo con un niño en brazos. lo mece. la mujer, en la otra esquina, hace punto de media.
Act 1, Scene 2
morning. […]
“Blood Wedding: Act 1, Scene 1″ ZJC (2006)
“[Drama] is when the word on the page desires to become human and stands up.”
– Federico García Lorca
Of late I have been becoming a tad bit obsessed with García Lorca’s gypsy poetry. There is, of course, his famous Gypsy Ballads, dealing with the myth of the urban […]
This morning I woke up humming Janis Joplin. I am not sure why, I haven’t thought of the dead hippie in a long time, and it is not like the radio stations in my town play her music. In fact, for the most part, you would never know there was music recorded before […]
The windflower, Garcia Lorca’s anemonas, takes us into a land of sleep and dream. The notes from Collected poems tell us: “[the windflower] is the flower of Morpheus” (page 946).1 According to Encyclopedia Mythica, Morpheus is the Greek god of dreams:
[He] lies on a ebony bed in a dim-lit cave, surrounded by […]
The last poem of the Gypsy Ballads, is a retelling of the biblical rape of Thamar by her half-brother, Amnón. This is a highly problematic poem, for what Garcia Lorca does here, I argue, is to present us with a sympathetic view of Amnón, that it was his overpowering sexual desire that caused him […]
The last of the three poems based on a saint, San Gabriel (Sevilla), appears whimsical at first glance, but there is a sinister quality to the whimsy. Two figures parade their way through the poem, Gabriel, saint and archangel, who pays a visit to Annunciatión de los Reyes, a gypsy woman, to tell her […]
Even though Garcia Lorca’s San Miguel (Granada) left me feeling a tad unsatisfied, San Rafael (Córdoba) makes up for it in dollops. First, there is Federico’s admiration for the lustrous Moorish architecture found in the city of Córdoba, along with the erotic imagery and a discreet exchange of Niños de cara impasible/ en la […]
This is the first poem by Garcia Lorca I have come across an expression or reference I have not been able to translate. He writes: efebo de tres mil noches,/ fragante de agua colonia/ y lejano de las flores, which I translated as: “An efebo, 3 thousand nights old,/ fragrant with cologne,/ yet […]
It’s only a speculation, but the images I have in my head of the hot-tempered Spanish might have a little to do, in part, with this poem.
Garcia Lorca wrote of Reyerta, “[the poem] expresses the mute struggle latent throughout Andalusia and Spain among groups that attack each other without knowing why, for mysterious […]
Perhaps, next to Romance sonámbulo, La casada infiel is the most famous poem from the Gypsy Ballads. I recall one of the first Dead Poet readings Ruelaine put on (this is 1992 or 93, I believe), Joyce Benvenuto came as the Gypsy of this poem, dressed with two cartridge belts and a sombrero, looking […]
What do we want out of poetry? Wrong question? Right; too voluminous in desire, too “we.” It is always easier to deconstruct than construct what we want.
What do I want out of neo-triad, quasi-shamanistic verse? A sense of other wildness? Order of a theophany type? More “cavort,” […]
I was sent a copy of Enrique Morente’s Lorca, his take on a dozen different poems by Federico, set to his powerful and deep cante, flamenco singing. A poem like Romance de la guardia civil española requires a Deep Song to carry it through. Even if the events of the poem are of […]
This photo was taken by my mother of the three of us; my father, myself and my brother (on the uke), singing in a little cabin up on the western shores of Beaver Island, Lake Michigan, June, 1996. I’d like to say we were singing gypsy ballads, but it was probably songs from the […]
Like the poem Ballad of the moon, moon the motif of kidnapping of a child by supernatural forces continues; however Garcia Lorca has introduced a now explicit erotic subversion. The poem takes place in another nocturnal setting, down by an un anfibio sendero, an “amphibious tidewater,” the seashore, where Preciosa is playing with […]
Of all the translations of the title of this poem, Romance de la pena negra, Loughran’s (1994) “Ballad of The Black Anguish,” is the closest to getting the same nuance as “Black Dread.” However, to understand why the more common “Ballad of Black Pain,” while an accepted, literal, traditional translation, doesn’t seem to work […]
Lorca’s La Monja Gitana, The Gypsy Nun has been examined as a Freudian metaphor for repressed sexuality; which, considering Federico’s closeted self and the nature of repression in the Catholic Church, really isn’t that much of a stretch for the imagination.
The idea of the nun, sewing bizarre and sensual designs into her lemon-colored cloth […]
“A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than any place else in the world.”
– FGL
Here is the second part of Garcia Lorca’s ballad concerning the gypsy, Antoñito el Camborio. It is an interesting device the poet uses, having a character within the poem talk to the poet as if […]
One down side to having to flee off to work at 3 in the afternoon each day is when you’re on a roll, say with one’s blog, it hurts having to stop in mid-sentence. Having said that, I went back to the translations I was working on when I abruptly broke off yesterday and […]