GARCÍA LORCA, Federico.

Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.

Madrid, Ediciones del Arbol, 1935. 4to, pp. 22, with 3 full-page lithographed plates by José Caballero; a very good, fresh copy in the original illustrated wrappers, spine repaired; contemporary ownership note on half-title (dated 1935); in a folding cloth case. First edition of Lorca’s famous elegy for his friend, the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who was gored to death by a bull in 1934. ‘During the last two years of his life Federico never forgot Ignacio or the circumstances of his death, as many of the friends of both have testified. Sánchez Mejías had died nobly, sacrificing his life in an ancient ceremony which, as Lorca once explained to Giovanni Papini, has nothing to do with sport but is a “religious mystery”, the “public and solemn enactment of the victory of human virtue over the lower instincts... the superiority of spirit over matter, of intelligence over instinct, of the smiling hero over the frothing monster”. This mythical view of the corrida was to find astonishing expression in Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, begun shortly afterwards’ (Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca, 1989, p. 391).Laurenti & Siracusa 99.

• GBP 3,000.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: F1102

• bookseller: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)