‘Poet in Spain’ Offers New Translations of Lorca’s Soulful Work

He evoked duende perhaps most fully in his “Gypsy Ballads,” published in 1928. It’s a canonical book in Spain. Here was a highly cultivated poet reworking Andalusian folk culture and myth. The high-low effect was startling. 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. It is the first major undertaking of its kind since “Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition” (1991), the work of several translators and edited by Christopher Maurer.

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. (These were published after his death under the title “Poet in New York.”) She focuses instead entirely on what she calls his “moonlit earthbound Spanish poems.”

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About Lorca’s New York versus his Spanish poems, Arvio writes, “To my ear, these voices are so different they could almost be the voices of two different poets.” The crucial word here is “almost.” The absence of these vital poems immediately renders Arvio’s book less necessary than Maurer’s in terms of seeing this complicated poet whole.

There are consolations. Arvio is a supple translator, and she has delivered a personal book. She has felt free to shift Lorca’s poems around in sequence, as he himself often did when putting together his books. Most notably she has shorn the poems of punctuation, as Lorca sometimes did in his drafts.

The spare effect can be riveting. Take this snippet of “Dreamwalking Ballad”:

Compadre can I swap
my horse for your house
saddle for your mirror
knife for your blanket
compadre I come bleeding
from the Cabra passes
If I could young friend
the deal would be done
But I’m no longer me
my house isn’t mine

At other moments, the punctuation is missed. You feel Lorca has been tamped down. His poem “Cazador” (“Hunter”), for example, begins with these words: “¡Alto pinar!” Arvio translates this, with a vast diminution in energy, as “High grove of pines.”

Lorca’s inverted question marks and exclamation points give his work a flamenco brashness. Witness the first stanza of “Árboles” (“Trees”) from 1919:

¡Árboles!
¿Habéis sido flechas
Caídas del azul?
¿Qué terribles guerreros os lanzaron?
¿Han sido las estrellas?

Arvio renders this in telegraphic yet somewhat lobotomized fashion:

Were you once arrows
falling from the sky
What terrible warriors shot you
Were they the stars

At other moments, Arvio’s translations are both less accurate and less felicitous than those in Maurer. The opening lines of “Reyerta” (“Brawl” or “Feud”), for example, read this way: “En la mitad del barranco / las navajas de Albacete, / bellas de sangre contraria, / relucen como los peces.”

Arvio gives us this translation: “Halfway down the gully / the blades from Albacete / glisten like fishes / flush with fighting blood.”

In Maurer’s book, it is: “Halfway down the gorge / knives of Albacete, / beautiful with enemy blood, / shine like fish.”

Beautiful with enemy blood. That isn’t just a gorgeous phrase, ripe with meaning, but it comports more exactly with Lorca’s Spanish.

The poems in this book include not only “Gypsy Ballads,” but the “Dark Love Sonnets,” with their death-haunted homoeroticism, and poems about the deadly goring of Lorca’s friend the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, among others.

Lorca’s poems from Spain are a poetry of dreams and journeys and glimpses from balconies, of sunbaked meadows and realms of erotic yearning. He went to the well often for the same elemental imagery: the sea, the wind, the moon, flowers and trees. His mind worked feverishly enough to induce hallucinations.

He completed 13 plays and nine books of verse between 1917 and 1936. This book includes one of those plays, a rich and gripping retranslation of “Blood Wedding,” written in 1932. It’s an unconventional choice to print it in a book of poems, but Arvio argues and then demonstrates that the language in it is of a piece with Lorca’s blood-warm verse.

The poet Ted Hughes, who once translated “Blood Wedding,” observed that “Lorca cannot be Englished.” Perhaps. But his life and work offer mysteries we’re still profitably untangling.

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