“Gacela del amor con cien años” — the Gacela of Love with a Hundred Years — is one of the most urgently lyrical poems in Federico García Lorca’s Dívan del Tamarit, the Arabic-Andalusian collection he completed in 1934 and never saw published. It is a poem about the absolute persistence of love: a passion so elemental that neither walls, nor distance, nor the weight of a century can contain it. The poem moves with the breathless forward pressure that defines Lorca’s mature gacelas — anaphoric, accumulative, driven by a symbolic logic of blood, water, and unstoppable desire.
This post presents the poem in all three of its languages: the original Spanish, a new English translation, and a new Italian translation, both by Enzo Martinelli for Blue Phoenix Editions. The trilingual facing-page format allows readers to trace Lorca’s imagery across languages — and to see, line by line, the choices every translation entails.
Read the poem — and the translator’s note on the decisions behind it. Continue reading Gacela del amor con cien años, de García Lorca ✒️📃🇪🇸
