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Federico Garca Lorca (1898-1936), Spain's greatest modern poet and dramatist, was murdered by Fascist partisans shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was by then and immensely popular figure, celebrated throughout the spanish-soeaking world, and at the height of his creative powers. After his death, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain.The manuscript of Lorca's last poems, his tormented Sonnets of Dark Love, disappeared during the Civil War. For fifty years the poems lived only in the words of the poets who had heard Lorca read them, like Neruda and Aleixandre, who remembered them as 'a pure and ardent monument to love in which the prime material is now the poet's flesh, his heart, his soul wide open to his own destruction'. Lorca's lost sonnets were re-discovered in Spain during the 1980s, and the Bloodaxe edition of his Selected Poems (1992; new edition 2021), translated by Merryn Williams, was the first to include English translations of these brooding poems.
