Gypsy Ballads, Federico García Lorca'

Tr. Sp-Eng from a review in Shvoong

 Federico García Lorca's poetic work Gypsy Ballads was published in 1928. The work is composed of eighteen romances with the themes of death, night, heaven, moon, all of them dealing with Gypsy culture.

 In this work, the two central topics are Andalucía and gypsys, but treated in a metaphorical and mythical way, developed in a synthesis between cultured and popular poetry. This work reflects, in the author''s opinion, the sorrows of a persecuted group of people, living on the margins of society pursued by the representatives of authority and by their fight against them.

 Federico García Lorca stylizes the Gypsy world and gets it away from costums and folklore quaintness, breaking the more common image that the public has of them. Leaving aside the poems of the three archangels, the series of poems can be divided into two groups, the first series with presence of women, more lyrical, and the second, more epic, where men predominate. Gypsys, by their beliefs and code, collide with two realities; love and "the others" that invade their rights or prestige, people of their own race or society that marginalizes them and press, whose armed wing is the Guardia Civil, usually leadign to blood and death. Love, personal law, beliefs, lead to death or a difficult healing moral wound. A remarkable romance is that of the Guardia Civil, which is not represented with much sympathy and takes an antagonistic role in the work. The poet melts narrative language with lyric, either of them losing their quality, and thus collecting the tradition of popular ballads, stories with descriptions, narrator and dialogues in direct style among the characters. the treatment of men and women in the work is very traditional, subject to the period in which the work was written.