For years, Federico Garcâia Lorca's lecture on duende has been a source of insight for writers and performers, including Ted Hughes, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, and Amanda Gorman. Duende: Play and Theory not only provides a path into Lorca's poetics and the arts of Spain, it is one of the strangest, most compelling accounts of inspiration ever offered by a poet. Contrasting the demon called duende with the Angel and the Muse, Lorca describes a mysterious telluric, diabolical current, an irreducible "it, " that can draw the best from both performer and audience. This new translation by Christopher Maurer, based on a thoroughly revised edition of the Spanish original of 1933, also included in this volume, offers a more accurate and fully annotated version of the lecture, with an introduction by eminent philologist Josâe Javier Leâon. Drawing on a deep knowledge of flamenco, and correcting decades of discussion about duende and its supposed origins in Spanish folklore and popular speech, Leâon shows to what extent the concept of duende - understood as the imp of artistic inspiration - was the playful, yet deadly serious, invention of Lorca himself. Lorca's bravura performance of duende is foreshadowed here with a bilingual version - the most complete ever - of his other major text on inspiration, "Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion, " in which he calls for greater freedom in poetry as if searching for duende and its "constant baptism of newly created things."--