Zóbel Reads Lorca: Poetry, Painting, and Perlimplín in Love - Paperback

by Federico García Lorca (Author), Fernando Zóbel (Translator), Fernando Zóbel (Illustrator)

A cherished erotic play by Federico García Lorca, illustrated by a major Spanish artist.

Painting, poetry, and music come together in Zóbel Reads Lorca, as Fernando Zóbel, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain's most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico García Lorca's haunting play about the wounds of love.

The premiere of Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, an "erotic allelujia" which Lorca once called his most cherished play, was shut down in 1928 by Spanish government censors who confiscated the manuscript and locked it away in the pornography section of a state archive. Lorca rewrote the work in New York, and an amateur theater group brought it to the Spanish stage a few years later. Since his death, the play has also been transformed into ballet and opera.

Zóbel Reads Lorca presents Zóbel's previously unpublished translation and features contextual essays from several scholars. Art historian Felipe Pereda studies Lorca in the context of Zóbel's development as a painter, Luis Fernández Cifuentes describes the precarious and much-debated state of the humanities in Zóbel's Harvard and throughout the United States in the 1940s, and Christopher Maurer delves into musical and visual aspects of the play's American productions.

Author Biography

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet and playwright. Fernando Zóbel (Fernando Zóbel de Ayala, 1924-84), born in the Philippines, was a painter, scholar, and influential figure in the Spanish avant-garde. He founded Spain's first museum of abstract art, the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, in the Casas Colgadas in Cuenca, Spain.