He felt "murdered by the sky." He was stunned by the vastness and scale of the city, which was for him a place where during the day people were mired in mindless games, fruitless labors, and at dusk poured into the streets in a human flood. Lorca's tenderness was affronted by the unforgiving angles and buildings. He was disoriented and carried off by the terrible rootlessness of the crowds, and he spoke of his unimaginable sadness, of being an "armless poet, lost/in the vomiting crowd." Lorca's vision of the crowd was influenced both by Walt Whitman who, he said, "searched it for solitudes" and by T. S. Eliot who squeezed everything out of it "like a lemon." Poet in New York is part "Song of Myself," part "The Waste Land."

The poet in Lorca's urban cycle is an intense flaneur- enraptured, enraged-who wanders all over New York City. Lorca's favorite neighborhood was Harlem, where he heard African American spirituals and jazz tunes that reminded him of Spanish folk music, especially his beloved canto jondo ("deep song"), traditional flamenco. His wanderings took him from the Upper West Side, where he lived in a series of residence halls at Columbia University, to Coney Island ("Landscape of the Vomiting Crowd"); he found his way from Riverside Drive to Battery Place ("Landscape of the Urinating Crowd") and over the Brooklyn Bridge ("City Without Sleep"). He was on Wall Street on the day of the stock market crash and afterward claimed to have seen six people commit suicide during Black Tuesday. There he felt, to an unprecedented degree, "the sensation of real death, death without hope." Lorca was staggered by the suffering around him, the greed, the anthropocentrism of urban life, and he responded with a series of phantasmagoric images, such as the opening of his "Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge":

"I have come from the countryside," Lorca said, "and do not believe that man is the most important thing of all." He was dumbfounded by the daily slaughter of animals, which he described as "a river of tender blood." He captured his disgust in "New York (Office and Denunciation)," where he wrote: "Every day in New York, they slaughter/four million ducks,/five million pigs,/two thousand doves for the pleasure of the dying,/a million cows,/a million lambs,/and two million roosters/that leave the sky in splinters." He denounces "the endless trains of milk,/the endless trains of blood," and becomes a bitter prophet who works himself into a frenzy of condemnation and offers himself up as a sacrifice:

"Being born in Granada," Lorca once said, "has given me a sympathetic understanding of all those who are persecuted-the Gypsy, the black, the Jew, the Moor, which all Grandians have inside them." He identified with those on the edges, the periphery. Lorca was thunderstruck by the racism he found in the New World ("Oh Harlem! Harlem!/There is no anguish compared to your oppressed reds"), and the theme of racial injustice, of social inequity, runs like a current through Poet in New York. He wanted to write, as he put it, "the poem of the black race in North America," and he struggled to understand, as he later told an interviewer, "a world shameless and cruel enough to divide people by color when in fact color is the sign of God's artistic genius."

The city Lorca discovered on his many solitary walks becomes in his book a prototype of the twentieth-century urban world. Lorca's diagnosis still holds as he inveighs against our hos tility to nature, "the painful slavery of both men and machines," the agonizing social injustice, and the indifference to suffering that seems to permeate the very atmosphere. Yet there is also a great exuberance underlying Lorca's nocturnes and morning songs, his furious rambles that took him all over New York City. The testament he left behind is a fierce indictment of the modern world incarnated in city life, but it is also a wildly imaginative and joyously alienated declaration of residence.

-Edward Hirsch

Introduction

Already a well-known poet and dramatist in his native Spain, Federico Garcia Lorca arrived in New York in August 1929, at age thirty-one, in time to witness the collapse of the stock market that sent the city into a tailspin and much of the world into the Great Depression. That October he experienced firsthand the despair of people who had lost everything. He saw the suicides splayed on the sidewalks. He sensed a city on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. Depressed and grieving over the results of a broken love affair, Lorca had been eager to reach the city and throw himself into its streets. He had read accounts of the grandeur, bustle, and diversity of the great metropolis and seen its images projected on movie screens. What he found had little to do with what he had read or seen. New York was larger and more consuming than any other city he knew. It was abrasive, dirty, caustic, cold, shadowy, and dangerous; in short, it was an analog of hell as terrifying as any depicted in literature or art to that time. All of what he experienced on the streets of the city, however, paled before the horror he felt on Wall Street, where, he wrote in an essay, "rivers of gold arrived from all parts of the earth, and with it death. Nowhere else on earth but there can one feel the total absence of the spirit." Coming to rid himself of grief, he encounters an abundance of grief; coming to witness the power of human endeavor, he finds inhumanity, tragedy, failure.

Seventy years later, those of us who had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Center rise over the cityscape and accepted them, reluctantly, as symbols of New York's vigor and permanence found it difficult to witness how easily they came down, how the raw materials of our daily lives-glass, steel, concrete, and human flesh-could, in the space of two hours, turn to rubble: "Murdered by the sky./Among the forms that move toward the snake/and the forms searching for crystal...." Their weakness was our weakness, their impermanence our impermanence. For weeks after the disaster, smoke and dust filled the air, and the prevailing winds carried them uptown to the Bronx, east toward Brooklyn and Queens, west toward New Jersey. That smoke had the strangest smell of wrecked buildings and decaying bodies, which we tried to avoid by closing our windows, by wearing ineffective felt masks, or by holding handkerchiefs to our faces. New York had received a deep wound and we felt those airplanes reach inside us, crash, and burn through our stin-filled morning again and again:

Seeking solace we read the literature of New York: the poetry of Whitman, the chronicles of Jose Marti, Hart Crane's "The Bridge," E. B. White's extraordinary essay, "Here Is New York," the myriad novels and plays the city has inspired; and we dove into Ginsberg, Corso, Koch, O'Hara-in short, into the body of work that informs and defines the spiritual fabric of our city. Then we came to Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York and saw reflected in this book the range of emotions we ourselves felt and images strangely reminiscent of the ones we witnessed on September 11 and its aftermath.

One afternoon a couple of years later, we realized a new translation of Poet in New York was needed that showed the city, not just as it was then but as it became after September 11, riven by tragedy, burdened by rage, humbled by grief.