Studying Lorca's Little Viennese Waltz (Pequeño vals vienés)

Dr Raquel Martínez Martín will be at the University of Edinburgh on Wednesday 28 October, talking about Federico García Lorca's poem Pequeño vals vienés (Little Viennese Waltz). It's part of a series of three events put on by The Cervantes Chair at the university, and it sits in a wider moment for Spanish literature: the centenary of the Generation of 1927 is coming up, and it's been 90 years since Lorca was assassinated.

Pequeño vals vienés first appeared in Poet in New York, published in 1940, and Martínez Martín's talk focuses on its musical afterlife. She'll be tracing how the poem has moved from the page into song, and how poetry, music, historical memory and political resistance all meet around it. The idea is to show how Lorca's work continues to take shape in sound across time, from his own musical imagination to the voices that have reinterpreted it for later generations.

If you're not familiar with the Generation of 1927, it was a group of poets and writers who changed the course of Spanish literature, and Lorca was one of its most famous figures. The centenary gives a good excuse to look back at that whole circle, and this talk is one of three events the Cervantes Chair is staging to mark it. The focus here is on the intersection of the written word and the music it inspires, so it's as much about how a poem lives on in sound as it is about the poem itself.

The talk is on Wednesday 28 October at 6:15pm at the University of Edinburgh, Old College South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, and it's free to attend.