Romancero Gitano 1924-1927 [Gyspy Ballads].

GARCIA LORCA, Federico.

$12,500.00

Item Number: 53005

Buenos Aires: Sur, 1928.

First edition of Garcia Lorca’s classic work. Octavo, bound in three quarters calf over marbled boards. Signed on the title page by Federico Garcia Lorca, who has drawn a face next to his signature. Books signed by Garcia Lorca are exceedingly rare, as he was killed in 1936. In very good condition with a contemporary bookplate of Fernando Ortiz to the pastedown with light rubbing. Ortiz was a Cuban essayist, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and scholar of Afro-Cuban culture. A very nice example, rare and desirable signed with desirable provenance.

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).