Volume 39, Number 13 · July 16, 1992
Austere Fireworks
By Michael Wood
Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition
by Federico García Lorca, edited by Christopher Maurer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 894 pp., $50.00
Four Puppet Plays, 'Play Without a Title,' The Divan Poems and Other Poems, Prose Poems and Dramatic Pieces
by Federico García Lorca, translated by Edwin Honig
Sheep Meadow Press, 157 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Line of Light and Shadow: The Drawings of Federico García Lorca
by Mario Hernández, translated by Christopher Maurer
Duke University Press, 273 pp., $49.95 (paper)
The House of Bernarda Alba
a film directed by Nuria Espert, by Stuart Burge, produced by Holmes for Channel 4
Federico García Lorca is one of the best-known poets of the twentieth century and one of the best-loved Spanish poets of any time, but he remains a curiously elusive figure, restless and changing in his work as in his life. Does he belong to tradition or to the avant-garde? Are his strengths his simplicity and closeness to the popular imagination, or his elegance, sophistication, and learning? Did the author of so many delicate children's songs also create all those poems and drawings riddled with ugly sexual fear? Can the poet of the darkly tormented homoerotic sonnets really have produced the shrill railing against 'fairies' that stains the 'Ode to Walt Whitman'? Is there a way to get from the haggard drama of The House of Bernarda Alba to the Pirandellian high jinks of The Public?
Review, 5793 words
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