Reviews

Presented here as the ``script'' of a 1988 ``chamber theatre'' staging of a broad selection of poems and prose by Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), this text does not really reveal the merits of Forman and Joseph's production, but serves to introduce splendid new translations of some of Garcia Lorca's written work. The book also unveils his line drawings and paintings (used as projections in Forman and Joseph's staging), intriguingly suspended, like the poems, between folk art and 20th-century modernism. Although the writer's rhythmic nuances, perhaps best typified in the sobbing fatalism of ``Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias,'' are too irreducibly Spanish to come across entirely, translator Josephs brings to his task a seeming artlessness, typical of the original, which accentuates the compressed shock of the images in almost any randomly selected phrase: ``The spilt blood is moaning / the mute song of the snake.'' The arrangement of works is roughly chronological, although no particular progression is apparent until near the book's end, with the inclusion of the New York poems and the ``Lament,'' which seems to foreshadow the poet's murder by a Fascist death squad two years later. (Nov.)

This sensitively prepared theater script based on Lorca's writings as translated by Josephs is supplemented by outstanding and seldom reproduced black-and-white photographs, color photographs of landscapes, and color and black-and-white sketches by Lorca himself. The script has been successfully performed at the universities of North Carolina and Western Florida. The 16-page introduction explains the genesis and fulfillment of the project and provides insight into Lorca's life and influences. Taking its title from Lorca's dictum that ``only mystery makes us live,'' the collage moves from his ostensibly privileged childhood (``my childhood was a rat fleeing through the darkest garden,/ a rat with golden funeral ribbons clutched in his tiny teeth'') to his prophetic inklings of assassination. The translations are competent enough but, lamentably, the publisher has not included the Spanish originals en face. Recommended for college drama and poetry collections.-- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.