Suite for Piano & Poet’s Voice

Translator's Note: As a type of “serial poetry,” the Lorca “suites” were written between the end of 1920 and the middle of 1923. Many remained unpublished during Lorca’s lifetime and were later reassembled from notebooks, notably in Andre Belamich's critical edition, Suites (Editorial Ariel, Barcelona, 1983). When I first attended to the several that had surfaced earlier, they struck me as a different kind of Lorca poetry than I had known before—still characteristically his but with a coolness and occasional quirkiness, a playfulness of mind and music that I found instantly attractive. The translations of the suites will appear in the second volume of a comprehensive edition of Lorca’s poetry, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux under the general editorship of Christopher Maurer.

—Jerome Rothenberg

 

Sketches

That road
got no people.
That road.

That weevil
got no home.
That weevil.

And this crawfish
gone to sleep.
This crawfish.

 

Prelude

The bullock
slowly
shuts his eyes.

Heat in the stable.
Prelude to
the night.

 

In a Corner of the Sky

The old
star
shuts her bleary eyes.

The new
star
wants to paint the night
blue.

(In the fir trees on the mountain:
fireflies.)

 

The Whole Works

The wind's hand
caresses the forehead of space
again &
again.

The stars half close
their blue eyelids
again &
again.

 

A Star

There is a tranquil star,
a star that has no eyelids.
—Where?
—A star…
In sleepy water
In the pond.