Secret sonnets Publisher hopes to inspire new readers with Lorca reprint

In the autumn of 1983, dozens of carefully chosen readers received an envelope containing a slim, red booklet of sonnets that had been locked away since they were written almost 50 years earlier by the most famous Spanish poet of the 20th century.

- Sam Jones

While those behind the initiative gave no clue as to their identities, their purpose was made abundantly clear in the dedication on the booklet's final page: "This first edition of the Sonnets of Dark Love is being published to remember the passion of the man who wrote them."

Here at last, lovingly pirated and printed in blood-red ink, were the deeply homoerotic and anguished verses that Federico García Lorca had completed not long before he was murdered in the early days of the Spanish civil war.

To commemorate the anonymous effort, to revisit a peculiar episode in Spain's literary history and to bring the poems to a new audience, a Galician publisher has now brought out a facsimile edition of that groundbreaking 42-year-old booklet.

Though long known to Lorca scholars - not least because they had been published in French two years earlier - Sonetos del Amor Oscuro had been hidden away by the poet's family, who believed their tortured and sensual lines would taint his legacy and stir up old hatreds.

Across the 11 poems, Lorca invites his love to "drink spilt blood from the honey thigh" and complains: "Your scorn was a god, my laments were moments and doves in a chain." In another, he begs for a letter to put him out of his misery: "I endured you, ripped open my veins/Tiger and dove upon your waist/In a duel of bites and lilies/So fill my madness with words/Or let me live in my calm/Night of the soul, for ever dark."