Sketches of Spain by Federico García Lorca (Translation by Peter Bush)
Ready to experience a profoundly beautiful yet provocative journey through the ancient towns, taverns and villages of Spain? Sketches of Spain will take you there. Originally published in Spanish as Impressions and Landscapes, spain sketches, Written by esteemed author Federico García Lorca, it can now be enjoyed by English-speaking readers as well. Translated by Peter Bush, a British professor of literary translation, and illustrated by noted artist Julian Bell, the book is a highly readable interpretation of García Lorca’s early 20th-century travelogue.
First published in 1918, the fourteen short essays or “sketches” recount Federico García Lorca’s experiences, reactions, and thoughts during four field trips through Spain made over a two-year period with his professor of literature at the University of Granada. , Martin Dominguez Berrueta. Federico, the seventeen-year-old son of a privileged landowner, sees churches and alleys, clerics and prostitutes, passions and poverty through the eyes of a budding humanist and poet.
Fundamentally, Sketches of Spain is as much an excursion of the soul as it is an excursion of the body: “And to travel the world so that, when we reach the door of the ‘lonely road’, we may empty our cup of all existing emotions, virtue, sin, purity and darkness”. In the pages of it, the author struggles with the relationship between the spiritual and the sensual: “We must be religious and profane, combine the mysticism of an austere Gothic cathedral with the wonder of pagan Greece.” This struggle is narrated, not with the student shyness one would expect from a seventeen-year-old, but with an elegiac beauty that heralds the rise of Spain’s most beloved poet.
Federico García Lorca dedicates Sketches of Spain to his piano teacher:
“To the respected memory of my old music teacher whose gnarled hands throbbed so often on the piano and inscribed rhythms in the air, hands he ran through his twilight silver hair like a wounded heartthrob suffering ancient passions invoked by a sonata of Beethoven. A saint!”
Federico García Lorca had been destined from his earliest childhood to a musical career. However, after the university excursion described in Sketches of Spain, his own passions turned increasingly to writing. Yet it is the well-learned musical disciplines of this beloved teacher that infuse García Lorca’s writing with such power, rhythm, and light.
In his Prologue, Federico García Lorca invites those readers who dare to “go through these pages” with him. I am very glad I accepted the challenge. I exhort you to do it too: you will be well rewarded. Good trip – have a good trip.
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