Federico García Lorca died young, at the beginning of the Spanish civil war, probably killed by the falangists, either for being homosexual or socialist or both, or else for more private reasons. Nobody knows for sure.
A few years earlier, between 1929 and 1930, he traveled to the American continent, spending time in New York, Vermont and finally in Cuba, before returning to Europe. He managed to witness the '29 Wall Street crisis, therefore experiencing both the excesses that predated it and the desperate times that followed it. He wrote this collection of poems during those months.
It took me a few stanzas to understand that trying to interpret each segment of his poems literally, even after translating his heavy symbolism, is a useless effort. The best way to read them that I could find is to try and visualize the images he draws through words, find as many connections as possibile between verses and stanzas, getting the "gist" of the whole rather than the meaning of each part, follow the rhythm and the sequence of the sounds by always reading them aloud and possibly in Spanish, only turning one's attention to the translated text when one doesn't understand some terms. And most of all one must always keep in mind the "where" and the "when". I don't believe that the author was really trying to give a description of the places he was visiting. He seemed to be trying to convey what the city of New York, the woods of Vermont or the pueblos and playas of Cuba were telling him about the relation between society, nature and the individual human beings, their strife towards personal and common progress - both material (industrialism) and social (capitalism).
To propose an analogy and a possible reading approach, García Lorca's poems should be read the same way one admires a painting by his friend and fellow surrealist artist Salvador Dalí.
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