Forged in Verse

Granada, 1918. A society column announces an evening of poetry at the Café El Español, and closes with a few extraordinary lines signed by a name no one remembers: Amparo García.

Decades later, a doctoral student combing the Granada Press Archive for the poets of the Generation of '27 "beyond Lorca" stumbles on that poem and cannot let it go. Who was this woman? The trail leads to a flat on Calle Nueva de San Antón, and to Doña Amparo Modesto, widow of a military pharmacist. She died only a week ago.

Among dusty furniture, a copy of Juan Ramón Jiménez's Antolojía with one poem ringed in red, and a handwritten acrostic hidden between its pages, a life starts to come back into view. It is a life of poetry written in secret on a rooftop, of literary gatherings where women were only shadows, of a summer in 1924 when the most celebrated poet in Spain came to Granada as a guest of the García Lorcas. It is also the story of how a woman's voice was quietly written out of history, in the city that she says, in one of her poems, "killed" her.

Part literary detective story, part elegy, Forged in Verse moves between the Granada of the 1920s and the Granada of the 1980s, through porters with prodigious memories, painters, street poets, and the anthologies that decide who is remembered. It ends with a gift: a selection of Amparo García's poems, presented in the original Spanish alongside their English translation.

A moving homage to all the forgotten women writers whose names we will never know.

Translated from the Spanish (Forjada en versos. La vida robada de Amparo García).