Description

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A new translation of Federico García Lorca’s captivating lecture on duende.

For years, Federico García Lorca’s lecture on duende has been a source of insight for writers and performers, including Ted Hughes, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, and Amanda Gorman.

Duende: Play and Theory not only provides a path into Lorca’s poetics and the arts of Spain; it is one of the strangest, most compelling accounts of inspiration ever offered by a poet. Contrasting the demon called duende with the Angel and the Muse, Lorca describes a mysterious telluric, diabolical current, an irreducible “it,” that can draw the best from both performer and audience.

This new translation by Christopher Maurer, based on a thoroughly revised edition of the Spanish original of 1933, also included in this volume, offers a more accurate and fully annotated version of the lecture, with an introduction by eminent philologist José Javier León. Drawing on a deep knowledge of flamenco, and correcting decades of discussion about duende and its supposed origins in Spanish folklore and popular speech, León shows to what extent the concept of duende—understood as the imp of artistic inspiration—was the playful, yet deadly serious, invention of Lorca himself.

Lorca’s bravura performance of duende is foreshadowed here with a bilingual version—the most complete ever—of his other major text on inspiration, “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion,” in which he calls for greater freedom in poetry as if searching for duende and its “constant baptism of newly created things.”

About the Author

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Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) is Spain’s best-known and most beloved poet and playwright. 

José Javier León teaches in the Center of Modern Languages, University of Granada, and is the author of numerous books and articles, including Bolero: El vicio de quererte. 

Christopher Maurer is professor of Spanish at Boston University. He is editor and translator of Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, New Letters to a Young Poet by Joan Margarit, and The Complete Perfectionist by Juan Ramón Jiménez, all published by Swan Isle Press.

Christopher Maurer is professor of Spanish at Boston University. He is editor and translator of Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, New Letters to a Young Poet by Joan Margarit, and The Complete Perfectionist by Juan Ramón Jiménez, all published by Swan Isle Press.

Praise For…

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"Finding Duende presents, in English and Spanish, the most complete and accurate versions so far possible of both “Duende: Play and Theory” (as it is titled here) and an earlier lecture, 'Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion.' . . . According to one of Maurer and León’s many rich footnotes, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that Lorca 'had one obsession. Do not bore the audience. He never did.' He does not here. Nor does this beautifully designed volume, which offers the pleasure of ten color illustrations (photographs, manuscript and typescript pages, and several drawings by Lorca) alongside the bilingual texts of both talks and essays by each of the editors. All are full of provocation and delight for poets and readers."
— RHINO Reviews

"For many of my generation of poets & readers (& beyond), Lorca was & remains a radical & necessary voice—the poems foremost but linked by him to the creation or extension of a new/old poetics, drawing from a presumed folk & popular tradition, centered on the word 'duende' as a poetry of 'black sounds' & 'demonic' energies, both in writing & performance. It is this yearning to have duende, or be possessed by it, that this book allows us to view as Lorca presented it in several groundbreaking lectures: compact but rich enough to create a Spanish ethnopoetics or a still greater & deeper poetics for the world-at-large. What José Javier León & Christopher Maurer give us here is crucial to our renewed sense of where poetry, however made or enacted, can still take us. In that sense, remarkable."
— Jerome Rothenberg, professor emeritus at the University of California-San Diego, renowned poet, anthologist, performance artist, critic, scholar, and author of Gematria Complete and Concealments & Caprichos

"In your hands is the definitive bilingual edition of what is perhaps the most enigmatic text of Federico García Lorca, the greatest poet of the 20th century in the Spanish language. Once again, the word of Christopher Maurer has illuminated the work of the great Federico, and José Javier León accompanies us on Lorca's path toward 'depths of the blood.' At a time when for many people the idea of poetry has become ever more banal, the recovery of this text, 'Juego y teoría del duende,' in this exquisite edition is cause for celebration for poetry lovers. The duende could not be in better hands."
— Fernando Valverde, associate professor of Spanish and Poetry at University of Virginia, award-winning author of America