The World Needed More Lorca

Dean Rader reviews “The Dream of Apples: Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca,” translated by Rebecca Seiferle.

By Dean RaderNovember 5, 2024

• Poetry

TRANSLATION CAN TAKE US to the most unexpected places.

And that is not metaphor.

In the 1990s, I believed I was a translator. I was living in Salzburg, Austria, actively, if not brilliantly, translating. Even now, when I type (or even think of) the word Salzburg, I can hear the Sound of Music tour buses rattling down the street, and it causes me great pain. I was there because Salzburg is the home of the Georg Trakl Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte—essentially, the archive for Georg Trakl, the stunningly talented but troubled early 20th-century Austrian poet. I was deeply engaged in a foolish project that involved translating all of Trakl’s poems in hopes of creating one authoritative edition of his work in English. I struggled with Trakl’s impenetrable lyrics for a couple months, until, one day in November, I woke up from an awful night’s sleep, packed up everything I owned, and fled to Spain. My destination was Fuente Vaqueros, the small town in Andalusia that the legendary Spanish poet Federico García Lorca called home. As I schlepped to the Salzburg Hauptbahnhof, I reflected on the fact that I was choosing Spanish over German, Spain over Austria, Lorca over Trakl. At the time, the decision to jettison Trakl and take up with Lorca felt edgy. Even dangerous. But I was all in.

Lorca held (and holds) a special place in my head and heart, as he does for so many. “There is no other poet like him in the history of poetry,” writes Robert Bly. “Everyone who reads a poem of Lorca’s falls in love with him, and has a secret friend.” Indeed, Lorca (1898–1936) is among the most beloved poets ever to write in Spanish, and his murder at the age of 38 is one of literature’s great losses. Lorca was executed on the orders of fascist military authorities in Granada almost immediately after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. For decades, the details of his killing were murky at best, but recently uncovered documents reveal that Lorca’s death was ordered by Franco-era leaders who accused the beloved poet and playwright of being a “socialist and a freemason,” and of engaging in “homosexual and abnormal practices.” According to his biographer, Ian Gibson, Lorca was shot along with three others at Fuente Grande, near Víznar, Spain. Lorca’s remains have yet to be discovered, though there is a park nearby where he is believed to have been killed and buried. Lorca was a joyous writer whose words sang the song of life and death.

I wanted to live inside that singing.

When I returned to the states, I began yet another foolish project (not the last, by the way). This time, it was a new translation of Lorca’s utterly beguiling poem “Oda a Walt Whitman.” I felt like every other version had gotten it wrong, and I was going to get it right.

Ha.

This is why I have great sympathy for Rebecca Seiferle. Try as you might, believe as you might, you just can’t get Lorca right. You may be able to get close, but his work is so slippery, so laced with eros and thanatos, so full of pivots and prevarications, so steeped in duende, that you can never nail it, especially in English.

Perhaps this is why there are so many different versions of Lorca out there—the way there are so many Rilkes. We all want to do the poems justice. So many of us feel Lorca. So many of us believe we hear Lorca more clearly. Trust me, we say. I have your Lorca.

The truth is, no one has your Lorca. But Seiferle tries really hard in the beguiling The Dream of Apples: Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. In her introduction, Seiferle admits that she finds previous translations of Lorca in English both “too simple” and “sometimes romanticized,” unlike Lorca in Spanish, in which she locates “a kind of sharpness, an interpenetrative depth.” Thus, in both translating the poems and selecting which ones to include, she explains, “I have tried to hear what exists on the page—while trying to rid myself of those often-unconscious assumptions that lead us to read Lorca as we have read him.” Seiferle does not tell us what those assumptions might be or how exactly we have read Lorca. Perhaps she is thinking of the various lenses through which we choose to read him—the surrealist lens, the queer lens, the Spanish lens, the dramatic lens, the martyred lens, the Andalusian lens, the folkloric lens, the mythical lens, the lens of duende. In this way, reading Lorca is a bit like reading Sylvia Plath. So much surrounds the author’s persona. How do we liberate the poems from various prisons in which we lock the poet?

One way is to bring the poem into English with minimal flourishes, making the poem as close as possible, linguistically, to the original. Seiferle does a nice job in this regard. When Lorca’s Spanish is literal and clipped, so too is Seiferle’s English Lorca. When Spanish Lorca is languid and talky, we get that in Seiferle’s version as well. And as Lorca’s voice evolves from book to book, Seiferle admirably follows suit.

Seiferle is not incorrect that translators, on occasion, have a tendency to lyricize Lorca’s words. Here are some examples from a little poem I’ve always loved, called “La Luna Asoma,” which I would probably translate as “The Moon Appears.” I’ve provided the opening stanzas in the original Spanish and five different translations:

Cuando sale la luna
se pierden las campanas
y aparecen las sendas
impenetrables.

¤

When the moon rises,
the bells hang silent,
and impenetrable footpaths
appear.

—Lysander Kemp

¤

At the rise of the moon
bells fade out
and impassable paths
appear.

—Alan S. Trueblood

¤

When the moon sails out
the church bells die away
and the paths overgrown
with brush appear.

—Robert Bly

¤

When the moon comes out
the bells fade into silence
and impenetrable paths
come to light.

—Merryn Williams

¤

When the moon rises,
the bells are lost,
and the paths appear
impenetrable.

—Rebecca Seiferle

Even if you don’t read Spanish, you can see that Seiferle’s version best replicates the word order and linguistic effect of Lorca’s. Hers is by far the most faithful to the original. It is also, I would say, the least poetic. My ear likes Bly’s “die away” more than Seiferle’s “are lost,” but to Seiferle’s point—the original bells do not die away. They are lost. Plain. Simple. Direct.

Seiferle might be at her best in her renderings of the poems from Diván del Tamarit (Divan of Tamarit), arguably Lorca’s second-best book, behind the stunning Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York). Written between 1931 and 1934, the poems of Divan were to be published in 1936, but the outbreak of the Civil War put everything on hold. Eventually, the book was released posthumously in 1940 (as was Poet in New York). This collection features Lorca improvising some fascinating Arabic forms, and the poems feel like a mashup of European Surrealism, Arabic love poetry, and Spanish folklorish whimsy, as in this wonderful stanza from “Gacela of the Dark Death”:

I want to sleep a while,
a while, a minute, a century,
so that everyone knows I have not died
that there’s a stable of gold on my lips
that I’m the small friend of the West wind
that I’m the immense shadow of my tears.

Seiferle has a good ear for Lorca’s rhythms and his subtle (and not so subtle) internal rhymes. Her “I’m the small friend of the West wind” feels like a fitting English option for “soy el pequeño amigo del viento Oeste.” His rhyme is more mellifluous, yes, but we feel the effect of the rhyme, its delivery of finality.

Divan of Tamarit contains a series of rather amazing gacelas, a form Lorca masters. A tiny but significant choice Seiferle makes is to break with tradition and not translate “gacela” as “ghazal,” which almost every other translator does, and which can be incredibly confusing to readers because Lorca’s gacelas are not even close to traditional Persian ghazals. A traditional ghazal is a closed poetic form that dates back to around the seventh century. Written in couplets, a ghazal repeats the same word throughout, as the final word of each couplet. Lorca’s gacelas rarely rhyme, are often composed in random stanzas, and skew toward European lyrics. “Gacela” is Spanish for “gazelle,” and like their namesake, Lorca’s limpid poems leap across and down the page with grace and determination.

With so many versions of Lorca out there—including a massive Collected Poems that (with the accompanying Poet in New York) clocks in at over 1,000 pages—it is worth asking about the value of a “selected” Lorca, especially since a similar project, Federico García Lorca: Selected Poems, edited and translated by Merryn Williams, just came out in 2021. Seiferle and Williams are different translators, to be sure. Plus, The Dream of Apples is less a greatest hits than a Lorca sampler. A map of Lorca. Seiferle’s cartography includes a smattering of poems from all of Lorca’s books, enabling us to see Lorca’s growth as a poet over his short life. Highlights include the marvelous “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” many compelling gacelas from Divan of Tamarit, and a generous selection from Poema del cante jondo (Poem of the Deep Song). Missing are the most famous poems from Poet in New York, like “The King of Harlem,” “After a Walk,” “Ode to Walt Whitman,” “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude,” “Landscape with Two Graves and an Assyrian Dog,” and many others. Poet in New York is Lorca’s most iconic collection and, to me, the most fiery of Lorca’s lyrics. It would have been fascinating to see what Seiferle would have done with them.

After typing the previous paragraph, I went back and reread the poems from Divan of Tamarit again. As a translator, Seiferle hits her stride in this collection. Her versions of these poems might be the best I’ve seen. And, I have to say, I heard a different Lorca from the one I was used to. Perhaps a not-so-surreal Lorca. Perhaps a more focused Lorca. A Lorca that sounds less like André Breton and more like Marianne Moore. Because this version is en face, with the Spanish versions on the left-hand page, I was able to spend more time with Lorca’s Spanish. When I went to Seiferle’s English, the poems felt pretty good. My ear hears more Neruda than Seiferle does, but my Lorca is not Seiferle’s. Or Bly’s. Or yours.

I love Lorca so much that it seems impossible I would come away from The Dream of Apples with a greater appreciation for his genius, but I did. In fact, I dug out my notebook from that initial visit to Andalusia and came across the brochure from the Casa-Museo Federico García Lorca. And while I did feel a powerful rush of nostalgia and joy, those emotions were quickly overpowered by deep, deep anger. The world needed more Lorca. He was taken way too early. Lorca was only six years older than Neruda and, like his friend, could and should have lived well into the 1970s and perhaps even into the ’80s. Imagine contemporary poetry with Lorca’s voice as part of the choir. I wonder what kind of life Lorca would have lived, what sort of impact he might have had, how poetry and theater might have been more enriched were he not—out of abject hate and profound fear—cut down.

But Lorca was about more. While I experienced unexpected anger, it seems only fitting to close with these lines from Lorca’s stunning poem “Gacela of Unexpected Love”:

I searched my heart, to give you,
the ivory letters that say always.

Always, always: garden of my agony,
your body fugitive always,
the blood of your veins in my mouth,
our mouth already without light for my death.