A new English translation of poems by the award-winning Spanish poet.

Pere Gimferrer’s writing spans more than fifty years in four languages, and is an attempt to restore and expand upon avant-garde tendencies in poetry that were largely abandoned in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Of his second book, The Sea Aflame, Octavio Paz wrote: “Our language will be, already is, larger by one poet.” In 1970, with Mirrors, Gimferrer began writing in Catalan, his mother tongue. Since then, he has won major prizes in Catalan and Spanish, with a body of work that includes writings on film and art history as well as translations of Beckett, Stendhal, and Mercè Rodoreda. The present volume, the first to draw on all phases of Gimferrer’s career—from Message from the Tetrarch, published when he was eighteen, to selections from his recent verses in Italian—is an ideal introduction to a man who, in the words of Roberto Bolaño, “is a great poet and also knows everything.”

Pere Gimferrer is a poet, translator, and novelist born in Barcelona, Spain. A two-time winner of Spain’s National Poetry Prize, he has written more than thirty volumes of poetry, essays, fiction, and criticism in both Spanish and Catalan. He is also a winner of the National Prize for Spanish Literature and the International Octavio Paz Prize for Poetry and Criticism. 

Adrian Nathan West is a novelist, essayist, and translator living in Spain. His criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. He has translated books from German, Catalan, and Spanish, including Jean Améry’s Charles Bovary, Country Doctor, which is published by NYRB Classics.