ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Lorca’s authorial status in the English-speaking world in the twenty-first century and considers where this reception is heading in the light of current debates around political correctness and cultural appropriation. It shows how in very recent times Lorca’s New York poetry has begun to be read in a rather troubling vein amid incipient accusations of cultural appropriation and even a certain romantic racism. The chapter notes how the most recent English versions have opted to avoid these texts, and how this would seem to reflect a considerable cultural chasm between Spanish readers, who still see his New York poems as an impassioned denunciation of racism, and students and readers of Spanish literature in the English-speaking world who increasingly find these poems troubling and redolent of a rather paternalistic racism. As new renderings of Lorca’s work continue to appear and his literary reputation continues to be rewritten through these successive retranslations, this chapter seeks to explore the reasons for this notable and perhaps permanent shift in the English translations of certain elements of Lorca’s work which scholars and translators have tended to shy away from lest it tarnish Lorca’s reputation as the quintessentially progressive literary martyr.
