ABSTRACT This article examines Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen’s radio program, “Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces” (April 26, 1969; Canadian Broadcasting Company CBC Radio) that features Federico García Lorca’s famous lecture “Juego y teoría del duende” (1930). We argue that recovering MacEwen and Lorca together cultivates what we call “recursive aesthetics” within sound media. This aesthetics stretches across the transnational context of Lorca’s translation and reception and the layered mediation through which MacEwen, and ultimately we as scholars, encounter and re-enact both poets. Our article is the first to examine MacEwen’s radio program and the first scholarship to discuss the circulation of Lorca’s essay in Canadian poetry. In Canada, in particular, duende becomes part of the ways that settler Canadian creative production looks to Spain in its national self-construction. MacEwen’s program features a wealth of “phonotexts,” recorded literary expressions, including recordings by British, Irish, and American actors and Canadian poets and literary texts from French, Irish, German, Welsh, and Spanish writers. This case study, therefore, reveals the role of multiple mediations in that construction: Lorca and MacEwen together reach backward and forward in time through their encounters in sound media, connecting living, listening communities in the present to a cultural history that remains in the air.
McLEOD et al. (2026) studied this question.