The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

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The road to this translation of Carlos Rojas’s The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell was a circuitous one. I first read the novel about thirty years ago, not long after its 1980 publication in Spanish. I was a fairly new translator then, and I kept thinking how wonderful it would be to translate the book and bring it to the attention of an English-speaking readership. As it turned out, I had to wait three decades for that hope to become a reality, but it did, finally, thanks to the Margellos World Republic of Letters and Yale University Press. During all that time I never forgot this extraordinary novel: its breathtaking originality, devastating evocation of historical figures, and sharp-eyed re-creation of the period preceding the Spanish Civil War. The constant explosive violence led to the murder in 1936, soon after the right-wing military coup that started the war, of Federico García Lorca, one of Spain’s leading poets and playwrights. He became Spain’s best-known martyr, a victim of history run amok.

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