Sonnets of dark love and Diván del Tamarit

Sonnets of dark love and Diván del Tamarit
by Federico García Lorca

Posthumous and cursed books by Federico García Lorca, the Sonnets of Dark Love and Diván del Tamarit were written between 1931 and 1936 and, for many, they are the pinnacle of Lorca’s poetry, even above Poeta en Nueva York. In the Sonnets he praises a love without limits, regardless of the sexual condition of the lovers, with a torn and vindictive tone. Published for the first time clandestinely in 1983 – to rescue them from the darkness in which they were buried – by Víctor Infantes and Luis Alberto de Cuenca, it is now the latter who is in charge of this new edition, illustrated with splendid paintings by Javier Juan’s. The volume is completed with the eleven gazelles and nine amorous casidas with an oriental flavor that Lorca sat on the couch of Tamarit, the name of an orchard owned by an uncle of the poet.

Federico García Lorca (Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, 1898 – road from Víznar to Alfacar, Granada, 1936) is perhaps the most important poet of the Generation of ’27 and the most popular and influential in Spanish literature of the 20th century. He lived in the Madrid Student Residence with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and was a friend of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Manuel de Falla, with whom he collaborated in the dignification of flamenco. In 1929 he undertook a trip to New York that would radically change his poetry. Just one month after the start of the Civil War he was arrested by the Civil Guard and later shot.