Zobel Reads Lorca: Poetry, Painting, and Perlimplin In Love

A cherished erotic play by Federico Garcia Lorca, illustrated by a major Spanish artist.

Painting, poetry, and music come together in Zbel Reads Lorca, as Fernando Zbel, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain's most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico Garca Lorca's haunting play about the wounds of love.

The premiere of Amor de Don Perlimpln con Belisa en su jardn, an "erotic allelujia" which Lorca once called his most cherished play, was shut down in 1928 by Spanish government censors who confiscated the manuscript and locked it away in the pornography section of a state archive.

Lorca rewrote the work in New York, and an amateur theater group brought it to the Spanish stage a few years later.

Since his death, the play has also been transformed into ballet and opera.

Zbel Reads Lorca presents Zbel's previously unpublished translation and features contextual essays from several scholars.

Art historian Felipe Pereda studies Lorca in the context of Zbel's development as a painter, Luis Fernndez Cifuentes describes the precarious and much-debated state of the humanities in Zbel's Harvard and throughout the United States in the 1940s, and Christopher Maurer delves into musical and visual aspects of the play's American productions.