Faithful Translation?

It’s the most famous poem by Spain’s most famous poet. Published in 1928, “La casada infiel” became so well known during Federico García Lorca’s short life that, egged on by his avant-garde friends Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, he disparaged it as “pure Andalusian anecdote” and refused to read it in public. But to Leonard Cohen, a Lorca devotee who named his daughter for the poet, it remained a source of inspiration and he translated it — twice. One version, “The Faithless Wife,” appeared in his 2006 poetry collection, Book of Longing. The second, “The Night of Santiago,” is on his posthumous album, Thanks for the Dance, released last November.

“Traduttore, traditore,” the Italians say — to translate is to betray. Cohen fans know what an excellent betrayer our foremost love poet was. In “Take This Waltz,” from 1998, he fashioned a compelling, suggestive song out of a...