Ready to experience a deeply beautiful yet challenging journey through the ancient towns, taverns, and villages of Spain? Sketches of Spain will take you there. Originally published in Spanish as Impressions and Landscapes, Sketches of Spain, written by esteemed author Federico García Lorca, it can now also be savored by English-speaking readers. Translated by Peter Bush, a British professor of literary translation, and illustrated by noted artist Julian Bell, the book is a highly readable interpretation of García Lorca’s travel journal from the early 20th century.

First published in 1918, the fourteen short essays or “sketches” relate the experiences, reactions, and thoughts of Federico García Lorca during four field trips to Spain over a two-year period with his literature professor at the University of Granada. , Martín Domínguez Berrueta. Federico, the seventeen-year-old son of a privileged landowner, sees churches and alleys, clergymen and prostitutes, passions and poverty through the eyes of a budding poet and humanist.

Fundamentally, Sketches of Spain it is both an excursion of the soul and an excursion of the body: “And travel the world so that, when we reach the door of the ‘lonely path’, we can empty our cup of all existing emotions, virtues, sins, purity and darkness “. In its pages, the author struggles with the relationship between the spiritual and the sensual: “We must be religious and profane, combine the mysticism of an austere Gothic cathedral with the wonder of pagan Greece.” This struggle is narrated, not with the second-year shyness one would expect from a seventeen-year-old, but with an elegiac beauty that heralds the rise of Spain’s most beloved poet.

Federico García Lorca dedicates Sketches of Spain to your piano teacher:

“In the respected memory of my old music teacher, whose gnarled hands pulsed so often on the piano and inscribed rhythms in the air, his hands ran through his twilight silver hair like a wounded heartthrob suffering ancient passions invoked by a Beethoven sonata . A saint! “

Federico García Lorca had been destined for a musical career since he was little. However, after the college excursion described in Sketches of Spain, her own passions turned more and more to writing. However, it is the musical disciplines so well learned from this beloved teacher that infuse García Lorca’s writing with such power, rhythm and light.

In his Prologue, Federico García Lorca invites those readers who dare to “go through these pages” with him. I am very happy to have accepted the challenge. I urge you to do so too: you will be well rewarded. Have a good trip – have a good trip.