The long-lost manuscript for Poeta en Nueva York showed up at one point and was sold by a London auction house to the Fundación García Lorca in 2003 (controlled by the Lorca family). Lorca had left it with Bergamín in Madrid right before going to Granada, where he was shot a short time later. For years a controversy raged, acrimonious at times, in Lorca studies. Some scholars thought that Bergamín had just "invented" the book, that it really should have been two books, Poeta en NY and Tierra y luna. Now we know that is not the case.

A critical edition published by the foundation and based on the manuscript should appear in 2009--69 years after the New York and Mexico publications of the two competing first editions.

Textual problems have haunted the reception of PENY for years. How can you read a book if you're not sure it really is a book, if you don't have any certainty about its definitve state? Normally that confidence precedes the reading of the book. The answer, for me, is that you read the version you have. The American reception of Lorca, the object of my particular project, is based on faulty editions and less than ideal translations, but those were the editions and translations that actually were used and we can't go back in time and change that.