Nadal, Rafael Martinez

New York. 1974. Schocken Books. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn and Scuffed Dustjacket With Some Tears. 0805235558. 246 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated Spain Literary Criticism. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The mystery of Lorca's ‘lost' unpublished drama THE PUBLIC is here disclosed by Rafael Martinez Nadal, the poet's close friend and the owner of what would seem to be the first draft of the play. Nadal, who awaits the necessary permission to publish the full text, gives here the exact details of the manuscript, a scene-by-scene synopsis of the play, and a detailed analysis. Thus, a new and unified view of Lorca's work becomes possible. The play is at once the most difficult and the most comprehensive of Lorca's writings, employing themes, images, and techniques that pervade the poems and dramatic work. Nadal shows that the surrealist quality of the scenes grew out of Lorca's efforts to bring the most intimate problems to the stage, in techniques decades ahead of Genet and Beckett. But the play is more than the first full-length surrealist drama and the first in which homosexual love is openly discussed and defended. It is Lorca's desperate cry for love on all levels and his lament for the utter solitude of man. In Part II, Nadal illustrates Lorca's leading ideas by close reference to his entire body of work and to letters. THE PUBLIC, he says, is not unique, but a link in a chain in which heterosexual and homosexual love together express love's power, Lorca's commanding theme. We see the poet's compassion for Yerma, Dona Rosita, the Prodigious Cobbler, Leonardo in BLOOD WEDDING. We see Lorca, the son of a rich landowner, declaring himself ‘on the side of those who have nothing,' as demonstrated so vividly in POET IN NEW YORK. This study, in the light of the revelations of THE PUBLIC, permits us to approach Lorca's work with fresh understanding and to appreciate anew his stature as one of the giants of twentieth-century literature. inventory #16380 ISBN: 0805235558.