The Tamarit Poems. By Federico García Lorca, translated by Michael Smith. The Dedalus Press, 68 pp. €8.80Michael Hartnett, another Irish poet, translated Lorca's poetry with aplomb - specifically Gypsy Ballads - but to my knowledge, no non-Hispanic poet, Irish or otherwise, has immersed himself so completely in the culture and poetry of Spain and Latin America as has Michael Smith.
So his understanding of Lorca, a sympathy in the literal sense, does not come out of the blue. He has translated a long list of Spanish-language poets, including Neruda, Machado, Hernandez, and perhaps the most difficult of them.
The Tamarit Poems is in the Dedalus Poetry Europe series, and is graced by a cover drawing by Tony O'Malley. It is a dual-language book, but terms like gacela and casida are necessarily retained in the titles. To quote from the notes:
"Divan, sometimes written Diwan, is the Arabic word for a collection of short odes or sonnets called ghazal (hence the Spanish gacela). The most famous divan is that of the great Persian lyric poet, Hafiz (c.1325-1389). Hafiz also wrote kasaid (hence the Spanish casida), idylls or panegyrics."
Incidentally, Tamarit is the name of a family-owned garden where many of the poems were written.
Given the above, and the Moorish history of Andalucia, it is easy to assume that the Divan del Tamarit is Moorish in subject and tone, but as Emilio García Gómez points out in the afterword, while it is at times possible to discover resemblances, Lorca's poems remain "separate from the Arabic verses".
Smith calls The Tamarit Poems "a version of Divan del Tamarit", but that is a modesty which belies their success in rendering Lorca's enchanting dance of images. As he points out in his concise and perceptive preface:
"It is the transmutability of the images in Lorca that exercises such a powerful fascination for readers. They do not, however, transfer into statements; they resist logical sequentiality and causality: they are not, in short, paraphrasable in other terms."
It is sad that such inherent qualities are so rare in contemporary poetry as to be remarkable, but perhaps this is why Lorca is still read avidly today.
He is at his incomparable best in writing of the pain of love:
Nadie sabía que martirizabas
Un colibrí de amor entre los dientes
- Gacela del Amor Imprevisto
No one knew you were torturing
A humming bird of love between your teeth.
- Gacela of Love Unforeseen
or:
La niña sueña un toro de jasmines
Y el toro es un sangrieto crepúsculo que brama
- Casida del Sueno al Aire Libre
The girl imagines a bull of jasmines
And the bull is a gory, bellowing sunset.
- Casida of the Outdoor Dream
The above, I believe, illustrates that Smith has caught what delights him in Lorca: his tone. I hope this unsettling, entirely quotable book finds many readers, and in particular, amongst the young.
Philip Casey's latest novel, The Fisher Child, is published by Picador