Gypsy Ballads
SynopsisPlot
Lorca described his poetic study of human nature as an intricate retablo of southern Spain. On the surface it depicts the daily struggles of a marginalized people, but beneath the surface there is so much more. In these eighteen poems Lorca illustrates for us with words and lyrical incantations the daily interactions of the oppressors and the oppressed. Here we have on display the seven deadly sins (and three last things!) that Hieronymus Bosch explored hundreds of years earlier with oil paint.
Story
About this book
Gypsy Ballads, first published in Spanish in 1928 as Romancero Gitano, gathers eighteen poems by Federico García Lorca. It is set in Andalusia, the region of southern Spain where he grew up, and centers on Romani lives and the pressures placed on them by surrounding society. Lorca called the book a retablo, meaning a painted altarpiece panel, of the region.
The poems move between concrete scenes of daily life and a more symbolic register. Rivers, wind, and the moon act almost as characters, and the Civil Guard appears as an armed presence, blurring the line between observed reality and dream. Violence, desire, grief, and defiance surface through compressed images rather than plain statement, and Lorca set the moral territory beside the painted world of Hieronymus Bosch.
The title points to a traditional form. The Spanish romance is a narrative ballad in eight-syllable lines, carried for centuries by singers and reciters before poets adopted it in print. Lorca wrote within that inherited shape while pulling it toward his own imagery. He belonged to the Generation of 27, a circle of Spanish writers and artists active in the late 1920s and 1930s.
