Canciones Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca, Tobias Tak (Illustrator), NBM Publishing (AUG 17) Hardcover $24.99 (160pp), 978-1-68112-274-8

The work of the famed twentieth-century Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca is given an additional, exciting visual dimension by Tobias Tak in the graphic adaptation Canciones Federico Garcia Lorca.

Garcia Lorca’s poems are known for their rich imagery and emotion. The twenty “visual poems” in this collection showcase the romantic and surreal, offering full respect to the original verses while introducing visual narratives that emphasize or expand their meanings. In “Conch,” the verse “Inside it sings an ocean of maps” is illustrated with the elements of ocean maps—a compass rose, Latin labels, and tiny ships—spilling from a conch. But these interpretations go beyond literal drawings of what’s described in the poems; the spirited art uses the poems as blueprints and inspiration. Pages of inventive design introduce a fantasia of humans, animals, and even inanimate objects, given personified form. “It’s True!” is a prime example of the surreal nature of the drawings, as a man with a massive head and undersized body pursues his romantic interest, a similarly proportioned bird, using a jack o’ lantern-topped hot air balloon.

The inclusion of an introduction by a Garcia Lorca scholar and a foreword by a comics artist indicates the balance that this book seeks, and achieves, between the written word and graphic accompaniment. The poems, in both their original Spanish and in English translations, run across the pages in cursive script, imparting a sense of intimacy to the proceedings. At the end of the book, two poems, “Song of the Departing Day” and “In Another Manner,” serve as grand good-byes, featuring the book’s characters and glimpses of Garcia Lorca himself.

Canciones is a beautiful book that combines outstanding written and graphic imaginations.