Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch

FAIN: FA-52861-07

Jonathan Mayhew
University of Kansas, Lawrence (Lawrence, KS 66045-7505)

My goal, during the period of the NEH fellowship, is to complete a book titled "Apocryphal Lorca," a study of the ways in which US poets have assimilated and distorted the poetry of the twentieth-century Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. I will examine translations, parodies, and apocryphal translations (translations lacking originals) in order to illuminate the cross-cultural creation of an "American Lorca" in several major postwar poets in the US. This creation is both reductive, in that it does not reflect the complexity of Lorca's work, and at the same time creative, in that it gives rise to new forms of poetry in the English language.