Barbarous Nights: Legends and Plays

by Federico García Lorca, Christopher Sawyer-Lauanno (Translator)

fiction & plays, Spain, tr C Sawyer-Laucanno

Genres: Plays, Poetry

79 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1991

About the author

Born 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.

Reviews

[Jerry Landry]

I greatly enjoyed Barbarous Nights for the experimental nature of the "poetic prose" and short plays that make up the collection. It shows a versatility and a vitality to Lorca's work that propels him into a highly revered place in the annals of literature.

[Debs]

One of the things I’ve discovered about myself as I get older is that I am not a surrealist. While I don’t mind a bit of it in theater and film, I absolutely cannot stand it in my literature and two-dimensional artwork. I picked up Barbarous Nights because I loved Nilo Cruz’s play Lorca in a Green Dress about Lorca’s life, but I found BN difficult to get through due to its more surrealistic nature. It just wasn’t my bag.

[vagarysociety]

i keep coming back to this brief collection again and again. "santa lucia and san lazaro" is perfection.

[Keith Miller]

Barbarous Nights: Legends and Plays by Federico Garc?a Lorca (1991)

[Josh]

A perfect little gem. A treasure.

[Anna Sircova]

I don’t know how to rate it ))
My first encounter with Lorca. Definitely food for thought and the foreword was very helpful to put some things in context.
These pieces definitely leave an impression . And yes, probably would be more vivid be it in a film or theater performance.