II - The Source of an Avant-Garde Voice: Music and Photography in José Moreno Villa

Summary

Travel to New York City was often a personal choice for Iberian writers, a choice not largely driven by the need to produce a text, but rather by the need to retreat. This has been the case for two writers from Andalusia: the well-known Federico García Lorca and the lesser-known José Moreno Villa, who each spent less than a year in the city due to personal circumstances. Their visits, however, would lead to the creation of literature written in situations that challenged their linguistic abilities, thus making them more receptive to other languages, sounds, and modes of expression in their surroundings. While highlighting the work of Moreno Villa, this second part considers the ways in which the city is brought into a text through an array of languages and discourses related to non-literary forms of artistic creativity.

Useful New York

Federico García Lorca's visit to New York City is arguably the most significant event in the history of literary relations between the Iberian Peninsula and New York. From June 1929 to March 1930, the 30-year-old Lorca wrote most of the poems that would become part of the influential collection known to anglophone audiences as Poet in New York. Six years after his return from the United States, Lorca left the manuscript on the desk of his Madrid publisher, José Bergamín, with a note that said “Back Tomorrow,” a message that the main branch of the New York Public Library highlighted in a 2013 exhibit of the manuscript that had been lost for decades. Lorca never returned to Bergamín's office, and scholars have questioned the whole provenance of the book ever since, not only because of the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the manuscript, but also the variations between published editions. Nevertheless, Poet in New York has profoundly impacted multiple literary traditions, generations of writers, and other artistic media.

Roughly a decade separates the composition of the poems and their initial publication. In 1939, a translation by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili was published in Britain, and in 1940 the W.W. Norton Company published another translation in New York.