Canciones: Federico Garcia Lorca

by Tobias Tak, Federico García Lorca, Christopher Maurer (Foreword)

Federico García Lorca is one of Spain’s foremost cultural and literary figures. In 1927, he published his masterpiece Canciones, a volume of lyrical poetry. Tobias Tak transformed twenty of these poems into a series of richly detailed and inventive comics. This collection will appeal to lovers of visual art, graphic novels, and poetry, and aims to bring the colorful and atmospheric landscape of Lorca’s work to a new audience. Includes an introduction by Lorca scholar, editor, and translator Christopher Maurer (The Collected Poems of Lorca).

Genres: Poetry, Graphic Novels, Comics, Spain

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

I am a creator of comics, prints, illustrations and graphic novels, all bursting with magical moments and vivid imagery. Inspired by Winsor McCay’s ‘Little Nemo’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’, my elaborately twisted tales of surreal worlds are hauntingly inhabited by outlandish creations.

I have always drawn and created magical characters and stories. After a successful career as a jazz tap dancer, singer and choreographer, I re-opened my inkpots and created an abundance of stories full of magic, surreal dream scenes and fairy tale themes

Reviews

[S. ≽^•⩊•^≼ I'm not here yet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dual-text of twenty Lorca's poetry with awesome pictures, great graphics, very special, I loved it. Beautiful, glorious poems with the sun, moon, trees, sea, wind, animals, and human characters. I enjoyed it.

Song of November and April
The Deceiving Mirror
Conch 🌊
It’s True! (my favorite)
Fable
First Anniversary
Second Anniversary
In a Girl’s Ear (my other favorite)
🌳I didn't want to.
I didn't want to tell you a thing.
In your eyes I saw two mad little trees...🌳

Song of the Barren Orange Tree 🌞
Debussy 🐸
The Mute Boy
Schematic Nocturne
A Song Sung
Riverside Songs
The Moon Comes Up 🌚 (my next favorite)
The Street of the Mute
Foolish Song
Farewell
Song of the Departing Day (my other favorite)
🌪...From east to west it is so hard for me
to carry you with your birds
and your arms of wind.🦜

In Another Manner

Introduction by Lorca scholar, translator Christopher Maurer and pictured by Tobias Tak.
Many thanks to Papercutz and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read Canciones by Federico Garcia Lorca in exchange for an honest review.
Published Date 17 Aug 2021
My review on 25 Jun 2021

[The Artisan Geek]

20/8/20
NL: mooie illustraties en super fijn dat de originele tekst er ook bij stond, want ik merkte al heel snel dat er ontzettend veel van de pracht van García Lorca's verloren ging in de vertaling.
EN: beautiful illustrations and it was great that the book was accompanied with original text, because I noticed rather early on how much of García Lorca's stellar prose was lost in (the Dutch) translation.

17/7/20
NL: Super cool dat een tweetalige geïllustreerde dichtbundel van Lorca bestaat!!
EN: It's so cool to see that an illustrated dual-text of Lorca's poetry exists!!

You can find me on
Youtube | Instagram | Twitter | Tumblr | Website | The Storygraph

[Catalina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful depiction of Lorcas’ lyrical prose. The art was stunning. Listened to some classical tunes and blended right in!

[Bandit · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some things that just go perfectly together like peanut butter and jam, or peanut butter and bananas or peanut butter and apples…basically lots of peanut butter things. And to that list one can now add Tobias Tak and Federico Garcia Lorca. A perfect pairing.
To be fair, I’m not a huge poetry reader. Now and again I do try, but modern poetry doesn’t seem to work for me and I’ve not yet sampled all of the classics. And so this is my first experience with Lorca. It isn’t modern and yet it does have that timeless appeal, these short, dreamy poems of his.
Tak came along and provided perfectly matched (in theme, tone and mood) art, from literal to imaginative interpretation of these lovely brief poems. And it just works so well together, it makes me think…maybe this is how poetry should be presented. The poems are provided in both English and their original Spanish, which was another bonus for all those wishing to stretch their linguistic muscles. I loved that, being able to compare the musicality of the rhythm and learn a new word or two.
The entire reading experience was just excellent, a multilayered enjoyment seldom associated with poetry for me. I’d even say this is the sort of book to come back to and revisit. Something magically dreamy or dreamily magical about it. It sang for me. Recommended.

[Leticia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garcia Lorca is one of my favorite poets, so I really liked his poems and the idea of a bilingual comic book with his poetry.
I also understand the artistic choices made to illustrate the poems even if the art wasn't subjectively to my taste.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Anna Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a beautiful collection of poems and illustrations! my favorite was definitely “Song of the Barren Orange Tree”. i’ll definitely be looking into Federico García Lorca more!!

[Granit Hysiqi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of short illustrated poems presented bilingually, meaning the original language which is Spanish hasn't been redacted and is presented together with the English translation. Now, reading through them can be a bit difficult at first since the original text appears to be merged together with the translation and by the time you can spot the difference the flow of the poem loses its charm.

Visually speaking, this is probably one of the better illustrated poetry books out there, thanks to Tak's art which makes this a decent introduction to Lorca's opus.

[Poptart19 (the name’s ren) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

A playful yet meaningful collection of Lorca’s poetry, meant to be experienced as music transcribed into poetry. I absolutely adore this bilingual edition’s vivid & delightful artwork. So much thought & effort was put into the illustrations, & the pictures sing like the words.

[What I liked:]

•I love that this edition is bilingual, which is I think the best way to read poetry in translation. I’m by no means proficient in Spanish, but I still appreciate reading the Spanish aloud & hearing the sounds of the original language, all the more since this poetry is meant to be music!

•The art is so detailed, creative, whimsical, & gives so much life to the words. It is true story telling, not just “simple” illustration. The art style also meshes with the feeling & intent of the poetry. It’s just fantastic!

•The poems are lovely! Lyrical, resonant, playful, wistful, fantastical. A true pleasure to read & read aloud.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•The text is in an attractive font & seamlessly incorporated into the art style & the images on the page, but it is curly & twisty enough to be hard to read. It would probably be easier to read in a print book. I was reading on my phone & so the text was smaller.

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Tobias Tak’s drawings of a selection from the Canciones evoke the essence of a young, in some ways optimistic, Federico Garcia Lorca. The modernist, genre-defying elements are all there, and the folk ballad nature of these particular poems comes through in the natural images and repetetive color schemes. One also senses the affinity with Salvador Dali associated with this time in Lorca‘s life. Artists and educators could use this collection as a springboard for numerous conversations and individual interpretations. The expert introduction lends context to the work as well.

Thank you to Tobias Tak, NBM Publishing, and NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Benicia Noia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esta novela gráfica pasó de ser una novedad a una grata sorpresa dentro de mis lecturas en este año. Desde los gráficos hasta los poemas me resultaron por demás interesantes y hermosos, muchos de ellos me tocaron profundamente y me emocionaron a tal punto de tener la necesidad de guardarlos como mis favoritos.

Una lectura inolvidable.

[Sean Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking illustrations!!!!

[Alejandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

* Thanks to Papercutz, NBM Publishing and Netgalley for an advance copy for review purposes *

What a beautiful book! I wish I had a paper copy.
I am a native Spanish speaker and have watched several performances of Lorca's Bodas de sangre and the chilling La casa de Bernarda Alba. I am also a flamenco dancer, and am familiar with some of his poems as lyrics of flamenco songs - e.g. "El Café de Chinitas".

I am thrilled at this stunning book to make Lorca's poems more accessible to English speakers. The text comes in both English and Spanish, so it would also be ideal for people learning Spanish.

Lorca's poems are short, so you could read this in 10 minutes. But why would you, when you can spend hours savouring the gorgeous, surreal Dali and Miro inspired art.

The one drawback is that the orange color used for half of the text blended too much into the art, and I ended up honing on the blue text, regardless of the language. I guess there are benefits to being bilingual. Reading the poems out load (specially in Spanish) really lets you enjoy the lyricism of Lorca's words.

Lorca's words are meant to be heard, so I leave you with a song by Enrique Morente, with lyrics from Lorca's Yerma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT6m3...

And a dance performance of "El Café de Chinitas" with no music, for full appreciation of the musicality of Lorca's words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xw1_...

[Theediscerning · Rating 2 out of 5]

A failure for me, I strongly admit there will be many who love this book. Taking over a dozen of Garcia Lorca's poems, and presenting them in fully-illustrated fashion, in both Spanish and English in the same image, there is a lot of cleverness and graft here. But when, to my mind, the effort in the visuals is designed to present such pretentious pish-tosh as this, it's kind of wasting everyone's time. For those coming here with a graphic novel head on, the design is wonderful, the full-on Victorian surreality of the visuals nudging me to think of Lear for sure, but also Tenniel and several other illustrators whose names escape me. I would suggest it's best to expect an art book, for while there can be a narrative this seems built more of individual frames than a graphic novel would be.

I think if you are here for the Lorca, you may find some of the artwork too literal, but you should find it splendidly fitting, and the words would only seem refreshed for you seeing them presented with such a conviction and powerful level of detail. To repeat, I can easily see how wonderful this is for the right buyer – but I'm just not that person in this instance. Part of my problem was seeing it in digital form, and the inability to read the hand-lettered text at the same time as seeing the full-page image. But a lot does boil down to the Lorca original, which I really found sixth-form waffle. I wouldn't give him house room, as we say, but Tak's achievements are a different thing altogether.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprise, it’s a bilingual book! That turned out to be a big bonus, but I originally picked this up bc it was an illustrated poetry book which I thought was going to be neat. And it is.
The art is insane.
The art style is crazy dreamscape everything flows together, just really interesting and engaging, 5 stars it kept me turning pages. There’s about two lines per page with a full color illustration and both English and Spanish cursive of the poem. They’re very short, and all would likely fit on half a page length wise if they weren’t broken up.

What I just could not connect to was the actual, well, poems. They fit the art style well enough but.. I just didn’t… none of them stood out to be memorable but I can remember all the blue moon art style for La Luna Asoma that really caught my eye.

I’ve never read anything by Federico Garcia Lorca so this was my first exposure to him. I can’t say I’d be drawn to his name in the future, but I will definitely look up more of Tobias Tak’s work as an artist.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher who gave me access to a copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Lucía ✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

*I was kindly sent this in exchange for an honest review via Netgalley*

“Por tu amor me duele el aire, el corazón y el sombrero”
vs
“Because I love you, the air, my heart and my hat hurt me”.

Bilingual edition of Lorca’s songs (or Canciones, in Spanish).

Thank god this is a bilingual edition because I would’ve hated to miss the original poems. I think the translator did a very good job with Lorca’s poems, but translating poetry is always so hard, thus the Frost quote “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”. The essence of the poems is there, but the rhymes (as it is obvious) are missing, the syntax differs in each language, and the general rhythm of the poem changes too.

It is super interesting to see the translator’s word choices, especially when a term exists in one language but not in the other.
The illustrations are gorgeous although some of them are quite eerie.

[Sinai C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Random book I found in the library - never heard of this guy before, but I'm glad I picked it up. It's got this surrealism to it that's confusing but entertaining. The drawings were very interesting too - I loved seeing the cameos of the characters from previous songs in other songs. It made it feel like a whole magical world.

My favorites were:
Canción de Noviembre y Abril (reminds me of seasonal depression)

Caracola (describes the beauty of the sound of the sea inside a seashell)

Canción del Naranjo Seco (very sad, but captures well the emotion of feeling desperate and lost)

Debussy (I love the last line of light illuminating the center of his shadow)

La Luna Asoma (There's something so odd about the statement that no one eats oranges under a full moon - instead, you should eat green and cold fruit, but it somehow makes sense to me? )

Canción Tonta (a cute song about a mom and keeping her child close to her)

[Ekila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Papercutz and NetGalley, I was able to enjoy this eArc in exchange for an honest review.

***
I read this alone, in my room with dim light, a little candle, and a harsh wind blowing out of my window. So I am not sure that the book wasn't sublimated by the atmosphere or if the book didn't help sublimate the atmosphere. Nevertheless, the reading of Canciones was quite ... not haunting, but dreamlike. Each page was a step into an ocean of colors. The drawing was so psychedelic, It was an enjoyable read and the Spanish-English retranscription of the poems made it even more enjoyable because we got to "hear" the poem in its original language. It gave the book another dimension of beauty.

Very lovely read !

[Seher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, NetGalley for actually having an app that I can look at this on! It's really awful to have to look at these books on your laptop or on adobe digital editions.

This was super pretty and very imaginative and is meant to be a very slow read and the illustration actually brought the words to life and helped me savor them.

"when the moon rises
the sea covers the land
and the heart feels like
and island in infinity"

I loved the journey of all the illustrated characters from the very start to the end in the bottle for the author; that was a lovely touch.

[Isabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and to Scratch Books for this ARC in exchange for a honest review.

I love the poems of Frederico Garcia Lorca, and in Canciones by Tobias Tak, we get a small sample, both translated as well as in its original spanish.

The accompanying beautiful illustrations together with the order of the poems tells a story of a very daliesque world. And by turning them into a comic inspired book, Lorca’s poems become more available and attractive to a new audience.

A job very well done.

[Isabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and to Scratch Books for this ARC in exchange for a honest review.

I love the poems of Frederico Garcia Lorca, and in Canciones by Tobias Tak, we get a small sample, both translated as well as in its original spanish.

The accompanying beautiful illustrations together with the order of the poems tells a story of a very daliesque world. And by turning them into a comic inspired book, Lorca’s poems become more available and attractive to a new audience.

A job very well done.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Canciones is a collection of Federico García Lorca’s poems. The collection has Lorca’s poems in both English and Spanish. I think that the poems sounded better in Spanish, but that’s just my personal preference. The illustrations were amazing and so detailed. The illustrations kind of gave me Clive Barker’s Abarat vibes.

*Thank you Netgalley for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.*

[Alastair · Rating 2 out of 5]

A curious book of poems in the original Spanish and an English translation, illustrated exotically.
It is hard to know what to think about this unusual concept. Personally, it didn’t really speak to me, neither the poems nor the art, and I felt it a shame that it was difficult to actually read the poems: the hand written font and the lines (in two languages) spread out among the artwork made it hard to bring the words together.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was gorgeous, and I enjoyed the poetry. Especially since it shows the orginal Spanish and the English translations on the same page as part of the art.

I will say this art at times feels like a fever dream, but it really works well.

What I didn't care for was the cursive font that they chose. While I typically don't struggle to read cursive this particular font I had great difficulty.

[nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Copy received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The poems were lovely and I enjoyed reading them, but I felt the focus was more on the aesthetics than anything else. Font could have been better and the way it was arranged sometimes to match with the illustrations made it a little hard to read.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was beautifully illustrated. When I was in undergrad for Spanish, we spent plenty of time reading Federico García Lorca! This would be the ideal gift for any poetry lover, literary Spanish-speaker, or comic aficionado.
Thank you to Netgalley for the arc!

[Marissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, magical, just so good. The art was so beautiful. The words told a wonderful story. It was almost like it was told thru a poetry like story of love and adventure. I lovd this whole thing the story, the polt and the characters. I loved that it was written in 2 languages.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love love love! Illustrated poetry is so magical, and this volume of illustrated Lorca is beyond magical due to the whimsical, vaguely-Seussian, vaguely-Dali-esque artwork made to accompany the already lovely words. I could read a thousand volumes like this.

[Andréa]

Note: I accessed a digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss.

[Lizeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent.

Full review at No Flying No Tights: https://www.noflyingnotights.com/blog...