Songs and Ballads

Federico Garcia Lorca regarded his poems, essentially, as verbal music and, in fact, performed each poem many times before he committed it to the pages of a book. "Performance poems," they were all intended to be spoken, sung, chanted, and not merely read. It is this aspect of Lorca's poetry which Robin Skelton has emphasized in his translations of some of the most delicate lyrics and dramatic narrative poems that Lorca published.