— Winner of the Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize —

Of Federico García Lorca, translator Rebecca Seiferle writes, “There are few Spanish poets who have so captured the English speaker’s imagination, and yet we continue to read Lorca as we have read him, which is to say through the filters of our own assumptions. Similarly, previous translations have gone in pursuit of surrealism or ‘music’ or romanticism at the expense of the sharp clarity and elemental intelligence of the original. … Breathtaking in its versatility, Lorca’s poetry conveys the sense that there are many Lorcas, but elusive, a play of presence and absence. For Lorca, fluidity and evasion are essential to the truth of poetry. His deep anguish, his performative masques, his sense of difference and his identification with those also marginalized, his sense of the interpenetration of absence and presence, all begin to interconnect if viewed from a queered center. These translations seek only the original, its deep intelligence, where a phrase can convey what Lorca called duende, an elusive ‘something else’ that evades all definition, ‘a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ ... the spirit of the earth.”

Praise for The Dream of Apples: Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca’s poetry continues to nourish and jump-start my imagination. His Spanish is ravishing, elemental, blood-close, and a thousand other things. Rebecca Seiferle’s translations are electric and intimate—I felt the jolts of Lorca’s singular imagery and the tenderness and turmoil that summons forth such language. I sensed the unsayable, the edges of ecstasy and despair. These magnificent translations are immersive. Read them. Share them. Dwell with them. —Eduardo C. Corral

The immense event and accomplishment that is Rebecca Seiferle’s new translation of Lorca is something to celebrate, for its rigor, its tenacity, its play, and for the way in which it breathes new life into one of the twentieth-century’s most brilliant poets. Lorca’s poems feel like an epic with narratives of violence and eroticism, and the mystical unknowability of the earth. “How odd that I’m named Federico,” writes Lorca in “Ending Songs,” and indeed his poems make us see just how strange and wild it is to walk the earth, to move through time, to persist, to love, to die. —Daniel Borzutzky

Federico García Lorca’s poetry is essential reading for every generation. In this new translation, Rebecca Seiferle selects work that foregrounds the poet’s range, fluidity, and powers of transformation. Seiferle has no interest in producing a perfected version of García Lorca, one seen glossy or in soft focus. She offers us a reading that, as she describes in her insightful introduction, requires “listening for the root of the word... that strange intersection of ‘common’ meaning and often unacknowledged power structures and the silenced interior voice.” Seiferle writes that when she started translating García Lorca more than twenty years ago, she did so to keep her queer heart alive. In The Dream of Apples, she does the same for him, an achievement that merits rejoicing. —Wendy Burk

Rebecca Seiferle’s terrific introduction to her new Lorca translations led me to engage with his work more deeply than in the past. She sees Lorca—feels him—differently. And she invites the reader to experience how the poems call us to our own “ambiguous selves.” The personal investment of her approach has produced English versions that are wonderfully clean, fresh, direct, unfussy, and full of subtle music. What a gift! —Ellen Doré Watson

From The Dream of Apples

• Two poems from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 18

Federico García Lorca is the preeminent Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century. From the beginning, his work was remarkably versatile, as he published in a variety of genres. His first poetry collection, Libro de poemas (1921), was preceded by Impresiones y Paisajes (1919) a work of prose, recounting his travels as a college student throughout Spain, and his first play El Maleficio de la mariposa, was produced the following year. In his lifetime, Lorca published five poetry collections, but a number of celebrated works, including Diván del Tamarit and Poeta en Nueva York were to be published posthumously and in other countries, as the works were viewed as too controversial in Francoist Spain. Published in 1928, his Gypsy Ballads made him famous in Spain and lead to international acclaim. In 1936, Lorca was killed by Fascist forces, and, following his death, his books were publicly burned in Granada and further publication banned. In the decades following, his works have been translated into many languages where they have continued to influence subsequent generations of artists in many fields. At the Prince Asturias Awards in 2011, Leonard Cohen spoke of his “deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico García Lorca” and how “he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.”

Rebecca Seiferle has published four poetry collections. Wild Tongue won the Grub Street National Poetry Prize, and Bitters won the Western States Book Award. She is a noted translator from the Spanish, having published translations of César Vallejo’s Trilce and The Black Heralds. Her translations of various poets are included in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. Her essay “Black Cactus Open in Reeds,” on Federico García Lorca appeared in Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Research and Development Grant, and was Tucson Poet Laureate for two terms from 2012–16.