Federico García Lorca
1898–1936
a p enguin since 1960
Federico García Lorca
Cicada!
Translated by Tyler Fisher, Catherine Brown and Alan S. Trueblood
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Translations first published in Great Britain in Selected Poems, Penguin Books 1997; The Dialogue of Two Snails, Penguin Modern Classics 2018; and newly translated for this edition
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2025
Translations of ‘Cicada!’, ‘The Old Lizard’, ‘New Heart’, ‘Qasida of the Weeping’, ‘Madrigal for the City of Santiago’, ‘Ghazal of Love Unforeseen’, ‘The Interrupted Concert’, ‘Nocturne of the Drowned Youth’, ‘Ghazal of Dark Death’, ‘Ghazal of the Flight’ and ‘New Songs’ copyright © Catherine Brown, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994
Translations of ‘Two Evening Moons’, ‘Song of Departing Day’, ‘Song of the Dead Orange Tree’, ‘Mr Lizard is Crying’, ‘Verlaine’, ‘Debussy’, ‘Sevillian Ditty’, ‘Prelude’, ‘Landscape’, ‘Schoolboy’s Song’, and ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’ copyright © Alan S. Trueblood, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994
All other translations copyright © Tyler Fisher, 2018 and 2025
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ISBN : 978– 0– 241– 74684– 4
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Cicada!
3 August 1918
(Fuente Vaqueros, Granada)
To María Luisa Cicada!
Oh happy cicada!
On a bed of earth you die, drunk with light.
You know from the fields the secret of life; you keep the tale of that old fairy who could hear the grass be born. Cicada!
Oh happy cicada!
For you die under blood of a deep blue heart.
The light is God descending, and the sun the chink it filters through.
Cicada! Oh happy cicada!
For you feel in your throes all the weight of the blue.
Everything alive that passes through death’s doors goes head down, with a white somnolent air. With speech only thought. Soundless . . . sadly, cloaked with silence, the mantle of death.
But you, cicada, die enchanted, spilling music, transfigured in sound and heavenly light.
Cicada! Oh happy cicada!
You are wrapped in the mantle of the Holy Spirit, who is light itself. Cicada! Sonorous star over sleeping fields, old friend of the frogs