IN SEPTEMBER 1928, Lorca's then close friend, the famous Surrealist artist, Salvador Dalí, wrote him an oft-quoted letter about his recently published ballad book. The book had as its central motif Spain's Romani people who go by the Spanish name Gitano: a name used not only by outsiders in Spain but also by the Romani themselves and one which we prefer to use here, both in its nominal and adjectival forms, rather than the commonly used ‘gypsy’ in English, an exonym that has pejorative connotations. Dalí's reaction to Lorca's book, entitled Romancero gitano [Gitano Ballad Book], was a mixed one. He saw in it ‘the hugest poetic substance that ever was, but completely bound to the norms of the old poetry, which is no longer capable of moving us or satisfying our present-day desires.’ And he added: ‘You probably think some of your images very bold, but I can assure you that your poetry moves within the illustration of the commonest and most conformist of commonplaces’ (Maurer 2004, pp. 101–02). Dalí was sure that it was these commonplaces rather more than the moments of poetic substance that had seduced readers and earned Lorca's ballad book its popular success. As someone in the know, Dalí distinguished his own reading from that of those he called the putrefactos (meaning ‘putrid’ or ‘putrified’), a term coined by students in Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes – the student residence where Lorca and Dalí first met – to apply to whatever or whomever ‘was considered bourgeois, out-of-date or artistically fetid’ (Gibson 1989, p. 140). ‘I love you for what your book reveals you to be,’ Dalí wrote, ‘which is the complete opposite of the reality the putrified of this world have made up about you – the dusky [Gitano] with black hair, childish heart, etc. etc.’ (Maurer 2004, p. 104). In a letter to friend and art critic, Sebastià Gasch, which he wrote shortly after receiving Dalí's critical missal, Lorca seemed to agree with the artist on this point: ‘Claro que mi libro no lo han entendido los putrefactos,’ he conceded, ‘aunque ellos digan que sí’ [‘Of course, the putrified haven't understood my book, even if they say they have’] (EC, p. 585).