Review of When Five Years Pass

Last week I had the absolute pleasure of receiving an e-mail from someone who really enjoyed my translation of Lorca 's "When Five Years Pass".

This of course was fantastic in itself - somebody liking your work (well, your interpretation of Lorca's work) is very rewarding - but it had the added value of knowing that I'm not alone in thinking this was one of Lorca's best plays.

After I replied to such nice person, she e-mailed back and told me that her 13-year-old daughter who speaks Spanish, is also a Lorca fan who impresses her Spanish teachers with her knowledge of Lorca's works for children. How absolutely fantastic.

Lorca's poems for children made it into popular culture in Spain. Indeed, I was exposed to them without ever realising it and I think the 35 year-old paperback is still in my Madrid room somewhere... It's therefore wonderful to see that they are still reaching young people, even miles away from his native Granada. His poetry will outlive Facebook, you'll see.

This book is in Spanish

I'm not going to reproduce the review here but I do invite you to go and read it on the Amazon page. It's a "proper" review, from someone who cares, who loves Lorca and who often takes the time to share her thoughts on her books.

Lorca's Grave

Following my post on 28 June 2011, you can read more on the plans to continue looking for Lorca's grave by following this link.

A Lorca Collage

I love the internet.

Thanks to a recent comment on the first post of this blog, I have discovered this beautiful video. It's very tastefully put, with a variety of footage in it, including some of Garcia Lorca himself. I'd always imagined him arriving in towns and unloading his "barraca" and now, I got to see him doing just that, with a smile on his face. I find myself needing to share this here, in The A to Z of Spanish Culture blog and my own personal one. As with the best art, I'll just leave you to enjoy it.

Thanks to Carmen Ferreiro, as I discovered it through her own blog. http://carmenferreiroesteban.wordpress.com/.

Ian Gibson and Lorca

I'm not sure he knows, but Ian Gibson's children went to the same school I did and him and is family lived in El Bosque in Madrid, just like I did.

The first time I heard about him was through my mother, who had quite a lot of respect for him. Many many years later, having exiled myself to London, I read one of his books "The Assasination of Garcia Lorca" and later watched a BBC series about Spain, which he presented and probably produced. Years later, for one of my birthdays, two of my friends gave me Lorca's biography, written by Gibson. It's the only book you need to find out everything about the poet and his work.

Gibson is obsessed with Lorca - can you blame him?

To read a recent interview with him, click here.

El Maleficio de la Mariposa - The Butterfly's Evil Spell

This is one of Lorca's "puppet plays" and one of my favourites. I translated it once and directed it for Forbidden Theatre Company's "Script in Hand Performances', round about the year 1999. I never dared produce it as a full show. The cast is large; the language is not straightforward; the design concept needs to be incredible as the cast is made up of cockroaches and other insects. Nothing literal will do, although I can't resist the temptation to share a photo from the original production, taken from http://margaritaxirgu.es/

 

The play is beautiful, wrapped in an innocence characteristic of Lorca's - but to an audience not used to dealing with parables and metaphors, it might look like a story for children. Far from it. 

So I take my hat off to Hip Pocket Theatre in the USA, for staging what looks, from the reviews, to be a very succesful production. (I am a little bit jealous that I didn't have the guts....)

Good luck with it from the other side of the pond. 

(I would have liked to post this earlier to raise a bit of awareness but haven't been able to.)

Podcast on Garcia Lorca

I am currently writing the book "The A to Z of Spanish Culture" and could not resist writing a whole chapter on Lorca. (Don't imagine a long chapter when I say "whole", each chapter of the book is under 1000 words long.)

D is for Duende can be downloaded from the site www.atozofspanishculture.com or from itunes, under the podcast of that name.

Craving Duende

In "Sketches of Spain" (published on the Huffington Post) Tamsin-Smith elegantly shares her craving of inspiration coming from a dark place and muses over the concept of "duende", so often linked to Garcia Lorca.