Romancero Gitano 1924-1927 (Gyspy Ballads).

GARCIA LORCA, Federico.

Item Number: 49084

Buenos Aires: Sur, 1928.

First edition of Garcia Lorca’s classic work. Octavo, bound in red flex boards. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author, “Para Josefina de Roman con el recuerdo de Federico Garcia Lorca Madrid- 1934.” Lorca has also drawn a sketch of a moon with face. In excellent condition with light rubbing to the extremities, small chip to the front free endpaper. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed.

Romancero Gitano (translated as Gypsy Ballads) is a poetry collection by Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, published in 1928. It is his best known book of poetry. It is composed of eighteen romances with subjects like the night, death, the sky, and the moon. All of the poems deal with the Romani people and their culture. The work reflects the pains of a people who live on the margins of society and who feel persecuted by the representatives of authority and for their struggle against that authority. However, Garcia Lorca himself points out that his interest is focused not on describing a specific situation, but on the clash that occurs again and again between the forces encountered: in a poem that describes the struggle between the Civil Guard and the gypsies, he calls these sides "Roman" and "Carthaginian" to imply the permanence of the conflict. "Their imagery is often vividly synaesthetic, inventive and unexpected . . . the poems celebrate and lament the concrete and the mysterious, in language that manages both to be startlingly fresh and obviously in debt to a rich tradition, that of the traditional Spanish ballad and its offshoots" (Gyln Pursglove).