The journalist from Barcelona, Víctor Fernández, has edited the volume ‘Don’t forget to write. The García Lorca family in their letters’ (Akal), which brings together more than 220 letters between the poet from Granada and his family.
The book gathers the letters, postcards, and telegrams «of which there is information to date» addressed by Federico García Lorca to his parents and those that the poet received from Vicenta Lorca Romero, his mother.
The starting point of the book is the volume ‘Letters from Vicenta Lorca to her son Federico’ (RBA), of which Fernández was also the editor in 2008, and from which emerged a portrait of the mother and a more intimate image of the poet.
However, as Fernández assures in the book’s introduction, the volume could not be limited to a reissue of that one, but it was necessary to incorporate the epistolary discoveries made after its edition, such as those presented in the exhibitions ‘Postal Geography. The postcards of the García Lorca and De los Ríos families’ in 2012 and ‘Memory in motion. Lorca and the archive’ in 2024, and the epistolary collection preserved by Bernabé López García.
The journey begins with the first known letter from García Lorca, dated between 1910 and 1911, addressed to his mother and ends with one received by his brother Francisco García Lorca and Laura de los Ríos, in October 1947, already after the poet’s death.
In between, there are more than 200 letters, with a focus on the poet telling his family about his time at the Residencia de Estudiantes, the publication of his works, and the staging of his plays; his stay in New York, Cuba, and Buenos Aires; those of his parents –Federico García Rodríguez and Vicenta Lorca Romero– to the writer, and the correspondence with his siblings.
The book also includes a letter sent by the actress Margarida Xirgu to the poet’s mother for the success of ‘Mariana Pineda’, or one from the mother to the literary critic Rafael Martínez Nadal dated 1944 about the copyright of her son.
In the prologue of the work, the historian and writer Esther López Barceló ensures that Fernández returns with the volume the «most intimate and spontaneous voice and, above all, has brought to the 21st century the embers of a family love that continues to crackle».
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