Federico Garcia Lorca’s lost poem was discovered 93 years after it was written Federico Garcia Lorca

A previously unknown verse attributed to Federico García Lorca has been discovered, 93 years after the famous Spanish poet and playwright wrote it down on the back of one of his manuscripts.

Lorca is believed to have written the eight-line poem in 1933 while working on the Diwan del Tamaret, a tribute to Arab poets in his native Granada.

The newly discovered verse was found on the back of a manuscript of one of Tamarit’s poems – Gacela de la raíz amarga – Purchased by flamenco singer and Lorca fan Miguel Poveda from a German antiquarian.

It has since been verified by Lorca expert Pippa Merlo and will be featured in an upcoming book.

This short verse, composed three years before Lorca was killed in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, reveals the poet’s familiar preoccupation with the passage of time: “The clock sings / I count the hours mechanically / Seven o’clock;

Poveda, who recently led the effort to transform Lorca’s childhood home into a cultural center dedicated to the poet’s life and work, said he was deeply moved by the serendipitous discovery.

“My attention was caught when Pippa Merlo said to me: ‘This is Federico’s handwriting. You have something new from Federico there,'” he told state radio TVE on Thursday.

“For me, it’s a sincere gift. It’s all in those lines, ‘It’s the mark of flesh / That I left behind, when I was gone / So that I would know where I was / When I returned.'”

Merlo said that although this verse had been overlooked because it was written on the verso of another work, it nonetheless revealed “the importance that the concept of time had for Lorca.”

The progressive gay writer—whose works include Gypsy Poems, A Poet of New York, Blood Wedding, Werma, and The House of Bernarda Alba—was shot dead by a right-wing death squad in August 1936, becoming perhaps the most high-profile casualty of Spain’s three-year civil war. His body was never found, and is believed to lie in a shallow grave at the bottom of a mountain slope near Granada.

Interest in Lorca grew as the centenary of his death approached. Last summer, a posthumously published edition of the poet’s tormented gay poem Sonnets of Dark Love brought the poems to new readers.

Although long known to Lorca scholars, the sonnets were hidden away by the poet’s family, who believed their torturous, sensual lines would sully his legacy and stir up ancient hatreds.

The newly discovered poem will be published in a book by Poveda and Merlo entitled Las cosas del otro lado. lo inédito en Federico García Lorca (Things from the other side: what has not been published in Federico García Lorca).