Behind the New Translations of Federico García Lorca’s Poetry with Knopf’s Deb Garrison and Sarah Arvio
November 10, 2017
For the first time in a quarter century, a major new volume of translations of the beloved poetry by Federico García Lorca, considered Spain’s most famous poet and dramatist of all time, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. POET IN SPAIN, presented in a stunning bilingual edition and heralded as a literary landmark, was edited by Deb Garrison, Senior Editor, Alfred A. Knopf. Here she shares fascinating personal insights into how this collection was created and the editorial process involved while working closely with Knopf poet, author and translator Sarah Arvio.


(c) Rigel Garcia de la Cabada[/caption] “As Sarah observes, poems like the iconic Gypsy Ballads were ‘full of radical iconoclasm: homosexual, feminist, anti-State, anti-religion. The descriptions of human desire, oppression and suffering are cloaked in a language so lovely you hardly notice the social criticism, the compassion for oppressed people, the belief in sexual liberty.’ In our age of gender fluidity, I was especially moved by Sarah’s freedom to enter the male love poems—bringing a feminine understanding into the work without missing a heartbeat. Sarah has composed the poems in English with her own style and sound, according to her personal sense of the powerful underground currents and bold wishes at the center of even the shortest songs Lorca penned. Also very exciting to me was that Sarah had found a few poems never formally published and never before seen in English, among them a love poem written on the back of a bill and saved for decades by a younger lover of Lorca’s, and the fragment of an unfinished sonnet that was probably connected to the Dark Love series. There is too much from this beautiful volume that I could quote—truly an embarrassment of riches, including a new translation of the play Blood Wedding, which Sarah calls a tragic poem in its own right—but I’ll share the Dark Love fragment. These eight lines of an incomplete sonnet, written on the thin, grayish paper he used for rough drafts, poignantly express the imaginative process and living energy of the poet, which Sarah Arvio has tried to breathe into every line of her book: [Oh hotel bed oh this sweet bed] Oh hotel bed oh this sweet bed Oh sheet of whitenesses and dew Hum of your body with my body Cave of cotton flame and shadow Oh double lyre that my love branches around your thighs of fire and cold white nard Oh tipping raft—oh bright river— now a branch and now a nightingale
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