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Zóbel Reads Lorca: Poetry, Painting, and Perlimplín In Love
A cherished erotic play by Federico García Lorca, illustrated by a major Spanish artist.
Painting, poetry, and music come together in Zóbel Reads Lorca , as Fernando Zóbel, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain’s most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico García Lorca’s haunting play about the wounds of love.
The premiere of Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín , 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.
Zóbel Reads Lorca presents Zóbel’s previously unpublished translation and features contextual essays from several scholars. Art historian Felipe Pereda studies Lorca in the context of Zóbel’s development as a painter, Luis Fernández Cifuentes describes the precarious and much-debated state of the humanities in Zóbel’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.
Painting, poetry, and music come together in Zóbel Reads Lorca , as Fernando Zóbel, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain’s most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico García Lorca’s haunting play about the wounds of love.
The premiere of Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín , 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.
Zóbel Reads Lorca presents Zóbel’s previously unpublished translation and features contextual essays from several scholars. Art historian Felipe Pereda studies Lorca in the context of Zóbel’s development as a painter, Luis Fernández Cifuentes describes the precarious and much-debated state of the humanities in Zóbel’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.
180 pages, Paperback
Published November 24, 2022
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About the author
Federico García Lorca
1,584 books3,119 followersBorn in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5 1898; died near Granada, August 19 1936, García Lorca is one of Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poets and dramatists. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with Machado as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced in the 20th century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 14, 2022
A beautifully designed and illustrated book. The story of how one of Spain's best modern painters discovered García Lorca and translated Lorca's favorite play into English. There are essays on the crisis of the Humanities in 1940s Harvard; on Zobel's early life in art, including his encounters with Rothko, Georg Grosz, Jackson Pollock... and on American productions of Don Perlimplín.
January 28, 2026
more than even the excellent translation of Lorca, this book provides a beautiful history of Zóbel, and arts and humanities education in the United States in the early 1900s, along with a deep appreciation for the cross-pollination between artists in different fields. and Zóbel's art is just wonderful.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews