Collected Poems
A Bilingual Edition
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ISBN10: 0374526915
ISBN13: 9780374526917
Trade Paperback
1056 Pages
$40.00
CA$53.00
This newly revised magnum opus offers us the entire poetic achievement of the most beloved poet of 20th-century Spain—and one of the world's most influential modernist writers.
For this monumental collection, Maurer, a leading Lorca scholar and editor, has assembled new and substantially reworked translations by twelve poets and translators from a range of scholarly backgrounds and creative traditions. This Collected Poems is therefore as thorough as it is accessible, featuring a fully bilingual format (with Spanish and English texts on facing pages throughout) as well as an index of titles and first lines. Also, the seminal volume Poet in New York is included in its entirety. This is the most comprehensive English edition of the world-class poet who, as Maurer writes in his illuminating Introduction, "spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death."
Reviews
Praise for Collected Poems
"With new and substantially revised translations by twelve poets and translators, plus the inclusion of the complete Poet in New York, this volume is one of the masterworks from the art of translation and world literature. Maurer has devoted decades of his life to García Lorca, and his commitment to bringing the poet's work to English audiences has paid off. To have García Lorca's work presented in its entirety is breathtaking, essential, and shows us how the 20th century's greatest poets survived darkness through the eternal power of poetry."—Ray González, The Bloomsbury Review
"Compliments and salutations are . . . due to the eminent Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer for bringing out this year, some 66 years after the poet's gruesome assassination near his home in Granada, the first almost complete bilingual edition of the Lorca corpus, with many previously uncollected and unpublished poems translated here for the first time. The volume is 'almost complete' due to the fact that the editor has thankfully given us only a brief selection from Lorca's first collection, The Book of Poems, the poet's lengthiest book and easily the worst, plain and simple . . . Twelve translators have participated in this estimable effort, and in general I found the versions to be not only accurate but also attentive to the quality of the poem as a poem in English . . . Professor Maurer's splendid edition is all the more treasured because we can finally take the measure of the poet."—Alexander Coleman, The New Criterion
"Meticulously and yet unobtrusively edited by Christopher Maurer . . . After 900-plus pages of unremitting brilliance, Lorca emerges as positively visionary. Through the sheer power of his imaginative genius, in lucid translations of his poems that are as intelligent as they are intuitive, we witness how the poet transcended his mostly self-imposed limitations and in the process not only expanded the scope of lyric poetry but also entirely redefined the elegy."—Rafael Campo, The Washington Post
"The definitive collection in English of one of the cardinal poets of the 20th century. Though it is his plays—Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba—that have gained drastically in currency, it is the poetry that remains astonishing."—The Buffalo News
"If you read this rich, powerful, and mystery-driven volume of Collected Poems, you will repeatedly encounter Lorca's duende, his daemonic genius . . . One of the greatest poets of all time."—Allen Josephs, Newsday (on the previous edition)
"[The translations are] both ingenious and accurate, setting a very high standard for translation of verse from Spanish."—Michael Wood, The New York Review of Books (on the previous edition)
