The Lorca Variations: I-XXXIII

Throughout a career spanning four decades, Rothenberg has been as prolific as a translator as he has been as a poet. Like much of his earlier work, these new poems straddle the borders of both genres. They ultimately become a dialogue with the silenced master: ``To write through Lorca, to come back on Lorca's wings . . . To return with Lorca only yesterday, to walk along the sea, under the stars.'' In the 1950s, before he was translating Native American writings and founding an Ethnopoetics movement, Rothenberg was influenced by the Spanish ``duende'' or use of imagery (a concept parallel to the ``deep image'' popularized by Robert Bly). Returning to those early concerns, he appropriates Lorca's imagery: moon, hills, death, olive groves. Liberally supplying his own verbs, and permitting explicit (homo)sexual references, the resulting poems have a hard edge not present in Lorca's work. Rothenberg's reading of Lorca as a surrealist is similarly far-fetched. But these digressions from the text, along with a concentration on what he considers Lorca's more playful pieces, offer Rothenberg a vehicle structurally reminiscent of his initial experiments with language, chance and performance, making this his strongest volume since the 1980 publication of Vienna Blood. (Oct.)