Zóbel Reads Lorca: Poetry, Painting, and Perlimplín in Love

Painting, poetry, and music come together in Z鏏el Reads Lorca, as Fernando Z鏏el, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain's most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico Garc燰 Lorca's haunting play about the wounds of love.

The premiere of Amor de Don Perlimpl璯 con Belisa en su jard璯, an "erotic allelujia" which Lorca once called his most cherished play, was shut down in 1928 by Spanish government censors who confiscated the manuscript and locked it away in the pornography section of a state archive. Lorca rewrote the work in New York, and an amateur theater group brought it to the Spanish stage a few years later. Since his death, the play has also been transformed into ballet and opera.

Z鏏el Reads Lorca presents Z鏏el's previously unpublished translation and features contextual essays from several scholars. Art historian Felipe Pereda studies Lorca in the context of Z鏏el's development as a painter, Luis Fern嫕dez Cifuentes describes the precarious and much-debated state of the humanities in Z鏏el's Harvard and throughout the United States in the 1940s, and Christopher Maurer delves into musical and visual aspects of the play's American productions.