ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the early process of Lorca’s literary and political martyrdom in the United States and the UK. Despite the translations made during his lifetime and his own personal collaboration in some of these versions, it was not until after his murder that the proliferation of politically oriented Lorca translations in English began to appear. An early example was Lament for the death of a bullfighter and other poems, published in London in 1937 by Heinemann, and translated by the Communist activist A.L. Lloyd, while other versions of Lorca’s work translated by Republican sympathizers such as Stephen Spender and Rolfe Humphries also appeared before the end of the decade. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that Lorca was being claimed exclusively in English translation not only by the Left but also by the Falange in Spanish, whose ‘official’ writers had already begun their attempt to disassociate themselves and Franco’s regime from Lorca’s murder. This process found its expression in English translation in 1952 through the right-wing South African poet and Franco apologist Roy Campbell in a volume entitled Lorca, an Appreciation of His Poetry, a concerted attempt to wrest control of Lorca’s reception in English away from the Left.
