This compact Penguin selection offers Lorca in Spanish with J. L. Gili’s plain prose translations facing the originals.
Gili is not trying to replace Lorca with an English poet of his own making, but to give non-Spanish readers enough linguistic scaffolding to hear the original poems themselves. The result is less a polished translation collection than a small bilingual reading apparatus—modest, useful and unusually intimate.
The selection moves through the central Lorcan world: riders, moonlight, blood, song, landscape, death, folk forms and the charged theatricality of Andalusia. Lorca’s poetry is often described as folkloric, but the folk material is never merely decorative; he compresses ballad, flamenco rhythm, surreal image and private erotic tension into poems that feel both ancient and unnervingly modern. His murder by Francoist forces in 1936 inevitably shadows the work, though these poems are more than relics of political martyrdom: their real power lies in how beauty and violence remain locked together, neither one explaining the other.
A lovely edition for readers beginning Lorca, students of Spanish, or anyone interested in poetry as sound before paraphrase. It is especially appealing as an object: small, patterned, and built around the old Penguin conviction that difficult literature could be made portable without being thinned out.
1965 Penguin Poets reprint of the 1960 edition, selected and translated by J. L. Gili. Bilingual paperback. Good condition with age-toned pages, light rubbing and edge wear, corner creasing, and the original 3/6 price marked on the front cover.
