Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca

Gypsy Ballads, 1928, became Lorca’s best known book of poetry. It was a highly stylized imitation of the ballads and poems that were still being told throughout the Spanish countryside. Philologists such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal worked with him to collect versions from the south, many in existence since the Middle Ages. García Lorca describes the work as a “carved altar piece” of Andalusia with “gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish and Roman breezes, rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial note of the naked children of Córdoba.