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.�

The magic of Andalusia is crystallized in Federico Garcia Lorca's first major work, Poem of the Deep Song, written in 1921 when the poet was twenty-three years old, and published a decade later. In this group of poems, based on saetas, soleares, and siguiriyas, Lorca captures the passionate flamenco cosmos of Andalusia's Gypsies, "those mysterious wandering folk who gave deep song its definitive form." Cante jondo, deep song, comes from a musical tradition that developed among peoples who fled into the mountains in the 15th century to escape the Spanish Inquisition. With roots in Arabic instruments, Sephardic ritual, Byzantine liturgy, native folk songs, and, above all, the rhythms of Gypsy life, deep song is characterized by intense and profound emotion. Fearing that the priceless heritage of deep song might vanish from Spain, Lorca, along with Manuel de Falla and other young artists, hoped to preserve "the artistic treasure of an entire race." In Poem of the Deep Song, the poet's own lyric genius gives cante jondo a special kind of immortality. "Lorca was a minstrel, and he understood poetry as an oral expression...In Poem of the Deep Song, Lorca did not try to imitate the lyrics or music of cante jondo, but he did, I think, rely on its compas in order to craft poems that would enact the experience of the solitary anguish that is cante jondo. " -Ralph Angel, Words Without Borders "[Garcia Lorca's] real impact, however, surely comes from the stark vividness of his imagery, his ability to conjure up primal subjective realms of love and death: The guitar makes dreams weep. The sobbing of lost souls escapes through its round mouth. And like the tarantula it spins a large star to trap the sighs floating in its black, wooden water tank." - David H. Rosenthal, New York Times Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a poet, playwright, and theater director. He was well-known as a member of the Generation of '27 who introduced symbolism, futurism, and surrealism to Spanish literature. City Lights Publishers also published another book of poetry by Federico Garcia Lorca titled Ode to Walt Whitman. Carlos Baur is the translator of Garcia Lorca's The Public and Play Without a Title: Two Posthumous Plays, and of Cries from a Wounded Madrid: Poetry of the Spanish Civil War. He has also translated the work of Henry Miller and other contemporary American writers into Spanish.

The gypsy is the starting point. The gypsy in its association with cante jondo. The influence that the gypsy may have had as a transmitter of the traditional romancero cannot be ruled out either.