Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Conor O’Callaghan’s rendering of “La casada infiel” is unfaithful to what was almost for sure Lorca’s intent in the original Spanish, and is hardly an improvement on Langston Hughes’s version, which O’Callaghan’s lengthy commentary fails to mention. Hughes did his first pass at a translation of Romancero gitano—Lorca’s most popular book, which launched his international career—in Spain, during the Civil War, at a meeting of writers (Alianza de Escritores) in consultation with Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, and other friends of Lorca’s.  He revised it later, with help from Lorca’s brother Francisco, at Columbia University, before publishing it in the Fall 1951 issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal.