FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA (Poet in New York) The Dawn

 

Federico García Lorca

Poet in New York

The Dawn

 

 

Poet In New York, the book.

Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is an astonishing depiction of a tumultuous metropolis that changed the course of poetic expression in both Spain and the Americas. Written during Federico García Lorca’s nine months as a student at Columbia University at the beginning of the Great Depression, Poet in New York is widely considered one of the most important books Lorca ever produced. This enduring and influential collection offers us a New York City populated with poverty, racism, social turbulence, and solitude—a New York intoxicating in its vitality and devastating beauty.
(extract groveatlantic .com)

 

 

The Dawn

 

 

The New York dawn has
four columns of mud
and a hurricane of black doves
that paddle in putrescent waters.

The New York dawn grieves
along the immense stairways,
seeking amidst the groins
spikenards of fine-drawn anguish.

The dawn comes and no one receives it in his mouth,
for there no morn or hope is possible.
Occasionally, coins in furious swarms
perforate and devour abandoned children.

The first to come out understand in their bones
that there will be no paradise nor amours stripped of leaves:
they know they are going to the mud of figures and laws,
to artless games, to fruitless sweat.

The light is buried under chains and noises
in impudent challenge of rootless science.
Throught the suburbs sleepless people stagger,
as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood.

…

..

.

Federico García Lorca – Poet in New York – The Dawn

(translated by Stephen Spender)

 

 

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) is one of Spain’s greatest and most influential poets. He wrote several plays now considered classics, including The House of Bernarda Alba and Blood Wedding, numerous essays, and approximately 1,120 pages of poetry.