Gypsy ballads

Federico Garcia Lorca is, with Cervantes, the best known figure in Spanish literature, though his fame owes as much to his murder at the outset of the Spanish Civil War as to his writing.

Fifty years on it is the writing both poetry and drama whose quality is being recognised and acclaimed, as recent performances of his plays suggest.Lorca's famous Gypsy Ballads were composed in the 1920s, when his poetic style was evolving from the traditional towards the surrealist.

The combination of the ballad's perennial narrative format with startling and allusive imagery has intrigued readers ever since.

Dr Havard argues that the fatalism and tribalism of the gypsy settings relate to Lorca's own subjective dilemma and sexual anxieties, and that they ultimately make a deeply personal statement.

The translations are broadly into free verse which aims to preserve the directness and the rhythm of the Spanish original so that the force of the poems may be appreciated by English readers.