In the year he spent in New York, Federico Garcia Lorca witnessed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and its aftermath.  His book Poet in New York, which dramatically captures that crisis in various ways, was not published until 1940, shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War and four years after the poet's assassination at its outbreak.  This lecture concentrates on the triple chronology of this landmark book - the year it was written, the year it was published, and our present day - and how economic, social, and identity crises are intertwined in a work whose poety is as much surrealistic as it is social.  Lorca's reflections on that experience in his lectures and letters might also throw some light on his enigmatic visions of a harsh reality in a book that was written in, and perhaps meant to be read in an era of global turmoil. 

Melcion Mateu (Barcelona, 1971), a writer in residence in the Library's Wertheim Study,  is the author of three books of poetry in Catalan - Vida evident (Octavio Paz Award 1999), Ningu, petit (an homage to Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland), and Jardi am cangurs, as well as numerous translations of authors such as John Ashbery, Michael Ondaatje, and John le Carre.  As a PhD candidate at NYU's Department of Spanish and Portuguese, he is currently completing his dissertation on the continuity of the avant-garde in Spain during the early years of the Cold War (1945-1953).

In conjunction with the Exhibition Back Tomorrow : A Poet in New York/Federico Garcia Lorca 

April 5 - July 21, 2013 - Wachenheim Gallery

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