In the Library
Gypsy Ballads
Federico García Lorca, 1928
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 25 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Translated for The Daily Canon
- Original
- Original es
- Chapters
- Chapters 18
- Length
- Length 5k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Green, how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge builds the same haunted ballad from a stricken man and a supernatural sea, but his nightmare unfolds in daylight rather than green moonlight.
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Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda
Neruda works the same Spanish music of desire and loss, but he names his sorrow plainly where Lorca dissolves his into unsolvable dream.
£1.99
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan casts the same hypnotic spell of half-glimpsed images and moonlit color, but the vision is an opium dream rather than a smuggler's ballad.
£1.99
About the book
Verde que te quiero verde. Green, how I want you green. The line arrives like a spell before you know what it means, and for the length of Lorca's most famous ballad you never quite will. A girl the colour of the sea dreams on a balcony under a gypsy moon, her flesh green, her eyes cold silver, while somewhere a wounded man rides back through the mountains toward her, bleeding from the gates of Cabra. What binds them, whether he arrives in time, what the green even is, Lorca refuses to say, and said he could not say himself. This is a poem you understand with your skin before your mind, its green wind and cold silver carrying a dread you cannot name. Read it aloud in either tongue. Let the refrain deepen and darken each time it returns, until the last green branch closes over something you were never quite shown. Few poems have made mystery this beautiful, or beauty this unsafe.