It reads, "In memory of Federico Garcia Lorca and all the victims of the Civil War."

Lorca remains a spirit of wonder and grace over Granada and Andalusia, places he loved deeply. He remains, too, the poet in New York, walking the streets, confronting its clamor, absorbing the city's energy (the urban spirit alive), and offering it all back to us in its horror and stark beauty, its squalor and magnificence, as the incarnation of our paradoxical age.

It was only when we started translating Lorca's Poet in New York that our sense of the work of a translator took on a dramatic change, or shift in perspective, because suddenly the goal became how to take the language that Lorca wrote in-which looks remarkably like Spanish but is really a language called Lorca-and renderthat into a language that looks remarkably like English but remains, again, a language called Lorca.

The need to approximate this language subtlety adds a difficult and complex layer to the work of translating. Lorca wrote into and as part of a culture and tradition, into and of a historical moment, as well as into and of a personal life (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual). All of these (and a lot more) are bound inevitably and inextricably into the poetry itself.

Our initial method of translating seemed rather straightforward, but it's clear that the straightforwardness has some important underlying assumptions. We agreed that each of us would translate every poem on our own. We would do these in small, previously agreed-upon bunches and then exchange these translations. Alternating the poems, each of us would be responsible for reconciling the differences between the two versions, a third version thus emerging. We'd then meet to reconcile those reconciliations.

We discovered along the way a lot of things. One was that even though neither of us would characterize ourself in any way as an academic literary scholar, we still needed to do a lot of critical homework, a lot of research about Lorca and Poet in New York. The research revealed to us the unusual provenance of the book. Lorca never organized the whole of the collection. It was not published as a single book in his lifetime, nor were a number of the poems that have been included in the collection. There are multiple variations on some of the individual poems and multiple versions with different poems included, excluded, or added as appendices, depending on the editors and translators, of the text we know as Poet in New York. As another set of translators, we have also been required to make choices about the text.

In addition to discovering the need for research, we discovered that our collaboration prevented us from being sloppy with language, from being imprecise, vague, or clunky, because each of us knew the other was looking over his shoulder. We found new ways to read through Lorca's surreal-like language and multiple ways to read what seemed at first to be easy lines. We learned from Lorca and each other new ways of reading the Spanish language-words specific to Andalusia and Granada, which are defined differently elsewhere. The word polos, for example, in the poem "Norma y paraiso de los negros" ("Norm and Paradise of the Blacks") can translate as the poles (North and South). But here things become interesting. Polo has a unique meaning in Andalusia, the region in Spain where Lorca grew tip. There it also means a form of traditional music and dance. Given the cultural reference in the title of the poem to Small's Paradise, a Harlem Renaissance jazz club, this suggested to its that, between the form of music and dance and the nightclub we could translate polos not as poles, but as flamenco because of the strength it gave to the image of the line: "the lying moon of flamenco" as opposed to "the lying moon of poles." And this is how we initially translated it. We liked the fact that it would have been an unusual translation. It was a translation we could have argued made sense save for one key fact: Lorca had not written el polo but los polos. This plural (the flamencos?) could only lead its back to the poles of north and south. And poles, after a lot of thinking, is what we realized made the most sense.

Another example is Lorca's use of the word chino, a common one in Poet in New York. Chino can refer to a Chinese man. In the feminine china can refer to a Chinese woman. But a naranja china is also a small juicy orange. The word chino can also indicate a kind of aural cacophony. It can refer to someone who is deceitful, a trickster.