The Lorca Variations

Download or read book The Lorca Variations written by Jerome Rothenberg and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As poet and experimental translator, pioneer in performance poetry and ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg for over three decades has been a literary radical and prominent influence in the American avant-garde. Among his own earliest sources was the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, whose "composition through images ... opened my mind to the contemporary poetry of Europe & of something possibly older & deeper that would surface for us in America as well." Having recently returned to translating Lorca, Rothenberg began to appropriate and rearrange items of Lorca's vocabulary and to compose a series of poems of his own that "both are & aren't mine, both are & aren't Lorca." As an original work, The Lorca Variations are, as he describes them, "a way of coming full circle into a discovery that began with Lorca & for which he has stood with certain others as a guide & constant fellow-traveler."