Did you like the city the water carved
drop by drop in the centre of the pines?
Did you see dreams and faces and paths
and the walls of pain the air lashes?

       Did you see the blue crevice of a broken moon
that the Júcar moistens with crystal and trills?
Did your fingers kiss the thorns
that crown the remote stone with love?

       Did you remember me when you climbed
to the silence the snake suffers,
prisoner of crickets and shade?

       Did you not see in the transparent air
a dahlia of sorrows and joys
that my burning heart sent you?

 

by Federico García Lorca

‘The Poet Asks His Love about the ‘Enchanted City’ of Cuenca’ is copyright © the Lorca Estate, 2016. It is reprinted from Sonnets of Dark Love (Enitharmon Press, 2016) by permission of Enitharmon Press. 

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

In The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love, written toward the end of Federico García Lorca’s brief life, desire and death come together in poetic chiaroscuro. In these dark and final meditations and flashes of passion, the poet pays homage to Spanish mystics, to Italian masters of the sonnet, and to the Arab poets of his native Andalusia. This poem appears in the bilingual edition translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca with essays by Christopher Maurer and Andrés Soria Olmedo. Read more about the poem on the Enitharmon website, and join Jane Duran for an evening of ‘Love and Resistance’, a salon event presented by Hope Road and Enitharmon Press, where she will be reading with author Leo Zeilig. The event takes place on Tuesday, March 28 from 6-8pm at Enitharmon Editions, 10 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL. For more details, visit Enitharmon’s site.

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)  

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