Federico Garcia Lorca as Folklorist: the Ibero-American Romance de don Gato

Abstract

Federico Garcia Lorca's interest in ballads {romances) dates from his childhood. Among his unedited hand-written manuscripts in the archives of the Fundación F. García Lorca (Madrid) is a version of the widely-diffused Romance de don Gato whose source he did not reveal. Utilizing its text, we have sought out some sixty orally transmitted variants, including that of his sister Isabel, together with musical transcriptions representing some twenty-three sung versions and variants from among unedited and published Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Valencian, Portuguese, Sephardic, and New World sources.