"Oh Lorca, Lorca - / shining singer:" William Carlos Williams in dialogue with Federico García Lorca's romances

Abstract

Federico García Lorca has been hyper-canonized in the US as a larger-than-life poetic figure. After his tragic assassination by a death squad at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), García Lorca was internationally hailed as a martyr and a symbol of the opposition to the Francoist dictatorship. The full gamut of García Lorca's reception in the English-speaking world has yet to be explored. Against the backdrop of stereotyped translations and misappropriations of all kinds, expanded over nearly a century, one wonders whether García Lorca's poetry has finally resisted the gravitational pull of his own "apocryphal afterlives" or, on the contrary, succumbed to them. Though García Lorca is a poet who has been read primarily in translations across the US, his legacy in the US goes beyond the reductionist limits of mediation through refracted translations. My initial hypothesis is that García Lorca's reception in US poetic culture is not exclusively restricted to a series of apocryphal avatars. Arguably, through Williams, who was then absorbing in the Spanish original some of the main tenets of García Lorca's poetry, the poet from Granada was beginning to exert a notable and enduring influence on US letters.