A. L. Lloyd – författare

A seminal work by one of the most influential figures of the English folk revival of the 1950s, Folk Song in England (1967) is an expansive account of the development of English traditional song, from the very oldest, ritual verse, through epic balladry, to the development of lyrical song in the industrial era.In a unique and ambitious approach, Lloyd marries the tradition of folk-song scholarship, largely derived from Cecil Sharp, with the radical historiography of E. P. Thompson, and in so doing produces a work of exceptional insight. In particular, his defining of 'industrial folk song' reveals traditional verse as an ebullient, living expression of the working people, perfectly adaptable to reflect their ways and conditions of life.

A. L. Lloyd was nothing if not versatile, ethnomusicologist, journalist, radio and television broadcaster, and translator. It is as the author of Folk Song in England, also reissued in Faber Finds, that he is best known, but, in this his centenary year (2008) Faber Finds is also celebrating him as a translator.1937 was A. L. Lloyd's annus mirabilis as a translator. In it he published both his translations of Lorca - Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter - and Kafka's Metamorphosis. There aren't many who can translate with equal facility from Spanish and German. Not only did A. L. Lloyd do that, his translations were both firsts, the first translation of Lorca into English and the first English translation of Kafka's most famous story. On first publication A. L. Lloyd's Lorca translation was widely praised with V. S. Pritchett especially commending it in The New Statesman.