Love love love! Illustrated poetry is so magical, and this volume of illustrated Lorca is beyond magical due to the whimsical, vaguely-Seussian, vaguely-Dali-esque artwork made to accompany the already lovely words. I could read a thousand volumes like this.

* Thanks to Papercutz, NBM Publishing and Netgalley for an advance copy for review purposes *

What a beautiful book! I wish I had a paper copy.
I am a native Spanish speaker and have watched several performances of Lorca's "Bodas de Sangre" and the chilling "La Casa de Bernarda Alba". I am also a flamenco dancer, and am familiar with some of his poems as lyrics of flamenco songs - e.g. "El Café de Chinitas".

I am thrilled at this stunning book to make Lorca's poems more accessible to English speakers. The text comes in both English and Spanish, so it would also be ideal for people learning Spanish.

Lorca's poems are short, so you could read this in 10 minutes. But why would you, when you can spend hours savouring the gorgeous, surreal Dali and Miro inspired art.

The one drawback is that the orange color used for half of the text blended too much into the art, and I ended up honing on the blue text, regardless of the language. I guess there are benefits to being bilingual. Reading the poems out load (specially in Spanish) really lets you enjoy the lyricism of Lorca's words.

4.5 stars

A playful yet meaningful collection of Lorca’s poetry, meant to be experienced as music transcribed into poetry. I absolutely adore this bilingual edition’s vivid & delightful artwork. So much thought & effort was put into the illustrations, & the pictures sing like the words.

[What I liked:]

•I love that this edition is bilingual, which is I think the best way to read poetry in translation. I’m by no means proficient in Spanish, but I still appreciate reading the Spanish aloud & hearing the sounds of the original language, all the more since this poetry is meant to be music!

•The art is so detailed, creative, whimsical, & gives so much life to the words. It is true story telling, not just “simple” illustration. The art style also meshes with the feeling & intent of the poetry. It’s just fantastic!

•The poems are lovely! Lyrical, resonant, playful, wistful, fantastical. A true pleasure to read & read aloud.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•The text is in an attractive font & seamlessly incorporated into the art style & the images on the page, but it is curly & twisty enough to be hard to read. It would probably be easier to read in a print book. I was reading on my phone & so the text was smaller.

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

Esta novela gráfica pasó de ser una novedad a una grata sorpresa dentro de mis lecturas en este año. Desde los gráficos hasta los poemas me resultaron por demás interesantes y hermosos, muchos de ellos me tocaron profundamente y me emocionaron a tal punto de tener la necesidad de guardarlos como mis favoritos.

Una lectura inolvidable.

I'm not a big poem person, but I liked that these poems were presented through pictures as well. I also always like to read the original (even in this case when I didn't understand it) as so much gets lost in translation. I was expwcting much more from the art, though.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Scratch Books for this ARC in exchange for a honest review.

I love the poems of Frederico Garcia Lorca, and in Canciones by Tobias Tak, we get a small sample, both translated as well as in its original spanish.

The accompanying beautiful illustrations together with the order of the poems tells a story of a very daliesque world. And by turning them into a comic inspired book, Lorca’s poems become more available and attractive to a new audience.

A job very well done.

This was a very interesting book. I had heard of Lorca (thanks to Star Trek) but had not pursued any of his work. Tobias Tak takes Lorca's lyrical poems and combines them with a surreal fantasy world. The illustration is beautiful.
The words are in both Spanish and English which is a great addition to the culture of Lorca's work.
This was a great first look into works by both men.

Garcia Lorca is one of my favorite poets, so I really liked his poems and the idea of a bilingual comic book with his poetry.
I also understand the artistic choices made to illustrate the poems even if the art wasn't subjectively to my taste.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for an ARC of this amazing book.

I absolutely adored this! I'm only a little familiar with García Lorca's work, but the wonderful illustrations of Tobias Tak have only endeared me to García Lorca's poetry further. Tak's ability to visualise the poetry is unparalleled, and I loved his whimsical style which seemed to be simultaneously rooted in fantasy whilst still remaining anchored to the real world, much like the words themselves. I loved that you could read both the Spanish and English together, and the way words and drawings came together on the page was really smoothly and harmoniously done so I could appreciate both equally. Such beautiful work!

“Por tu amor me duele el aire, el corazón y el sombrero”
vs
"Because I love you, the air, my hear and my hat hurt me”.

Bilingual edition of Lorca’s songs (or Canciones, in Spanish).

Thank god this is a bilingual edition because I would’ve hated to miss the original poems. I think the translator did a very good job with Lorca’s poems, but translating poetry is always so hard, thus the Frost quote “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”. The essence of the poems is there, but the rhymes (as it is obvious) are missing, the syntax differs in each language, and the general rhythm of the poem changes too.

It is super interesting to see the translator’s word choices, especially when a term exists in one language but not in the other.
The illustrations are gorgeous although some of them quite eerie.

Thanks to Papercutz and NetGalley, I was able to enjoy this eArc in exchange for an honest review.

***
I read this alone, in my room with dim light, a little candle, and a harsh wind blowing out of my window. So I am not sure that the book wasn't sublimated by the atmosphere or if the book didn't help sublimate the atmosphere. Nevertheless, the reading of Canciones was quite ... not haunting, but dreamlike. Each page was a step into an ocean of colors. The drawing was so psychedelic, It was an enjoyable read and the Spanish-English retranscription of the poems made it even more enjoyable because we got to "hear" the poem in its original language. It gave the book another dimension of beauty.

Very lovely read !

3.5 stars
Tobias Tak’s drawings of a selection from the Canciones evoke the essence of a young, in some ways optimistic, Federico Garcia Lorca. The modernist, genre-defying elements are all there, and the folk ballad nature of these particular poems comes through in the natural images and repetetive color schemes. One also senses the affinity with Salvador Dali associated with this time in Lorca‘s life. Artists and educators could use this collection as a springboard for numerous conversations and individual interpretations. The expert introduction lends context to the work as well.

Thank you to Tobias Tak, NBM Publishing, and NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.

Amazing, magical, just so good. The art was so beautiful. The words told a wonderful story. It was almost like it was told thru a poetry like story of love and adventure. I lovd this whole thing the story, the polt and the characters. I loved that it was written in 2 languages.

This was beautifully illustrated. When I was in undergrad for Spanish, we spent plenty of time reading Federico García Lorca! This would be the ideal gift for any poetry lover, literary Spanish-speaker, or comic aficionado.
Thank you to Netgalley for the arc!

Surprise, it’s a bilingual book! That turned out to be a big bonus, but I originally picked this up bc it was an illustrated poetry book which I thought was going to be neat. And it is.
The art is insane.
The art style is crazy dreamscape everything flows together, just really interesting and engaging, 5 stars it kept me turning pages. There’s about two lines per page with a full color illustration and both English and Spanish cursive of the poem. They’re very short, and all would likely fit on half a page length wise if they weren’t broken up.

What I just could not connect to was the actual, well, poems. They fit the art style well enough but.. I just didn’t… none of them stood out to be memorable but I can remember all the blue moon art style for La Luna Asoma that really caught my eye.

I’ve never read anything by Federico Garcia Lorca so this was my first exposure to him. I can’t say I’d be drawn to his name in the future, but I will definitely look up more of Tobias Tak’s work as an artist.

This is a surreal and beautiful graphic novel — worth reading, exploring, and revisiting. A fine example of the medium.

Forgettable, honestly, although the poems were indeed beautiful. Art was wonderful too, too wonderful that it really stole the show. There was too much focus on it, instead of the poems, which is what brought it down a little. Font could have been better too, a bit difficult to read sometimes.

Canciones is a collection of Federico García Lorca’s poems. The collection has Lorca’s poems in both English and Spanish. I think that the poems sounded better in Spanish, but that’s just my personal preference. The illustrations were amazing and so detailed. The illustrations kind of gave me Clive Barker’s Abarat vibes.

This was gorgeous, and I enjoyed the poetry. Especially since it shows the orginal Spanish and the English translations on the same page as part of the art.

I will say this art at times feels like a fever dream, but it really works well.

What I didn't care for was the cursive font that they chose. While I typically don't struggle to read cursive this particular font I had great difficulty.

A failure for me, I strongly admit there will be many who love this book. Taking over a dozen of Garcia Lorca's poems, and presenting them in fully-illustrated fashion, in both Spanish and English in the same image, there is a lot of cleverness and graft here. But when, to my mind, the effort in the visuals is designed to present such pretentious pish-tosh as this, it's kind of wasting everyone's time. For those coming here with a graphic novel head on, the design is wonderful, the full-on Victorian surreality of the visuals nudging me to think of Lear for sure, but also Tenniel and several other illustrators whose names escape me. I would suggest it's best to expect an art book, for while there can be a narrative this seems built more of individual frames than a graphic novel would be.

I think if you are here for the Lorca, you may find some of the artwork too literal, but you should find it splendidly fitting, and the words would only seem refreshed for you seeing them presented with such a conviction and powerful level of detail. To repeat, I can easily see how wonderful this is for the right buyer – but I'm just not that person in this instance. Part of my problem was seeing it in digital form, and the inability to read the hand-lettered text at the same time as seeing the full-page image. But a lot does boil down to the Lorca original, which I really found sixth-form waffle. I wouldn't give him house room, as we say, but Tak's achievements are a different thing altogether.