Federico García Lorca, Spain‿s greatest modern poet and dramatist, was murdered by Fascist partisans in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was by then an immensely popular figure, celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and at the height of his creative powers. After his death, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain. The manuscript of Lorca‿s last poems, his tormented Sonnets of Dark Love, disappeared during the Civil War. For fifty years the poems lived only in the words of the poets who had heard Lorca read them, like Neruda and Aleixandre, who remembered them as ‿a pure and ardent monument to love in which the prime material is now the poet‿s flesh, his heart, his soul wide open to his own destruction‿. Lorca‿s lost sonnets were re-discovered in Spain during the 1980s, and this was the first book to include English translations of these brooding poems. Merryn Williams‿ edition draws on the full range of Lorca‿s poetry, from the early poems and the gypsy ballads to the agitated Poet in New York sequence and the Arab-influenced gacelas and casidas which followed his American exile. It includes the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Lorca‿s great elegy for his bullfighter friend, as well as the full text of his famous lecture on the duende, the daemon of Spanish music, song, dance, poetry and art. In these remarkable translations, Lorca‿s elemental poems are reborn in English, with their stark images of blood and moon, of water and earth; of bulls, horses and fish; olives, sun and oranges; knives and snow; darkness and death.

Merryn Williams is a poet, critic, translator and editor, and was the co-founder of The Interpreter's House. Her publications include Six Women Novelists (Macmillan, 1987), Preface to Hardy (Macmillan, 1993), Wilfred Owen (Seren, 1993); a novel, The Chalet Girls Grow Up (Plas Gwyn Books, 1998); and a continuation of Jane Austen's unfinished novel, The Watsons (Pen Press, 2005). She has published five poetry collections, of which the latest is The Fragile Bridge: New and Selected Poems (Shoestring Press, 2019); and has edited three anthologies also published by Shoestring, The Georgians 1901-1930: An Anthology (2009), Poems for Jeremy Corbyn (2016) and Poems for the Year 2020: Eighty Poets on the Pandemic (2021). Her edition of Federico García Lorca's Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1992, including the first published English translations of the Sonnets of Dark Love; a new edition WAS published in 2021.