It was as if Robert Lowell had made a murderous little book that drew its inspiration from Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.”The poet and translator Sarah Arvio is here now with “Poet in Spain,” a new translation of Lorca’s poems into English. Unlike Maurer, Arvio omits Lorca’s intemperate and political and Whitman-inflected New York poems, written after he visited the city in 1929 and 1930. She has felt free to shift Lorca’s poems around in sequence, as he himself often did when putting together his books. Lorca’s poems from Spain are a poetry of dreams and journeys and glimpses from balconies, of sunbaked meadows and realms of erotic yearning. The poet Ted Hughes, who once translated “Blood Wedding,” observed that “Lorca cannot be Englished.” Perhaps.

Source: New York Times October 30, 2017 16:52 UTC