Selected Poems

Federico Garc?a Lorca, Spain’s greatest modern poet and dramatist, was murdered by Fascist partisans in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was by then an immensely popular figure, celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and at the height of his creative powers. After his death, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain. The manuscript of Lorca’s last poems, his tormented ‘Sonnets of Dark Love,’ disappeared during the Civil War. For fifty years the poems lived only in the words of the poets who had heard Lorca read them, like Neruda and Aleixandre. Lorca’s lost sonnets were re-discovered in Spain during the 1980s, and this was the first book to include English translations of these brooding poems.