Lorca, Federico García: Suites

Green Integer, paperback

Translated by Jerome Rothenberg

Publication Date: July 1, 2000

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One of the great Spanish poets and playwrights of the 20th century, Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada. He was murdered by Francisco Franco’s soldiers in 1936.

Suites may be the most charming and melodious of all his poem series. Written early in his career, most of these poems remained unpublished during his lifetime and were later reassembled from notebooks. The first appearance of this work in English was in the Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), and in a small chapbook titled Four Lorca Suites (Sun & Moon, 1989). This is the first complete single-volume edition.

Jerome Rothenberg (1931–2024) was an internationally known author of over 60 volumes of poetry, among them Gematria (Sun & Moon, 1993). He co­edited the anthology Poems for the Millennium (University of California Press, 1995).

"Madrigal"

Like concentric waves
on the water,
your words
in my heart.

Like a bird that collides
with the wind,
your kiss
on my lips.

Like open fountains
fronting the night,
my dark eyes
on your skin.