Poetry News

Lorca’s writing from the grave (again)

By Harriet Staff

The Guardian reports on a manuscript by Federico García Lorca found in the Library of Congress’ music division. The manuscript features new lines from the poem “Office and Denunciation,” which was written about his time in New York, during the great depression. Some of the great new lines include “I offer myself to be devoured by Spanish peasants,” and “This is not hell, it is the street.” Christopher Maurer, a professor of Spanish at Boston University, says of this period of Lorca’s writing:

After the stock market crash of 1929, which Lorca actually witnessed, he has a more vivid sense than ever of America’s lost potential…Days after writing this poem, in January 1930, he tells his family that the rest of his work ‘pales’ before his new poems, which have impressed his friends and ‘which, in a way, are symphonic, like the noise and the complexity of New York’.

Posted in Poetry News on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 by Harriet Staff.