Gypsy Romance

“With bell-clear passion, Wallace Barker brings heartfelt freshness to the task of translating Lorca’s spectacular, gypsy-inspired ballads, the first poetry bestseller in the history of Spain. Barker renders Lorca’s exquisite, distinctive lyricism (legendary in the Spanish-speaking world) and fanciful imagery into pleasing English— with authentic diligence, finesse, and devotion.”

—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and author of Lorca to the Umpteenth Power.

Romancero Gitano, the famous gypsy ballad cycle by Federico García Lorca, is now vividly translated by Wallace Barker as GYPSY ROMANCE for the modern era. Eighteen romances of old Spain make reality retreat and the impossible immediate— poems full of duende, mourning, fancy, and loss populated by children, archangels, gypsies, criminals, and the celestial bodies themselves. These poems awaken a reverie, a collective gitano dream that the reader may enter, but will not find so easy to escape.

64 pages. ISBN 979-8-9906925-1-0.