José Ángel Valente (1929–2000) produced more than twenty volumes of
poetry and many important essays. He lived in Switzerland from 1958
to 1982, and some of his work was not allowed to be published in
Franco’s Spain. Valente expressed that poetry is a "revelation of
an aspect of reality to which there is no means of access other
than through poetic knowledge." He was awarded the Premio Príncipe
de Asturias de las Letras in 1988, the Premio de la Fundación Pablo
Iglesias in 1984, the Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana
in 1993, the Premio de la Crítica in 1960 and 1990, and the Premio
Nacional de Literatura posthumously in 2000. Upon his death in
2000, The Independent called him "Spain’s greatest contemporary
poet."
Thomas Christensen is the author of 1616: The World in Motion and
New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas. He has
translated, often in collaboration with his wife, Carol
Christensen, works by Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Alejo
Carpentier, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, among others. He lives in
Richmond, California.
Winner of Spain’s Premio Nacional de Literatura
Considered by many to be the major poet of postwar Spain—the
primary heir of Machado, Jiménez, García Lorca, and Cernuda—José
Ángel Valente has taken a long time to reach English, but Thomas
Christensen’s crystalline translation has made it worth the wait.
—Eliot Weinberger
One of the most important poets of postwar literature. Valente’s
work . . . answers to a single commitment: with the word. —El
País
Valente exemplified poetic integrity, pushing poetry into terrains
that compete with religious, mystical, and Heideggerian notions of
inner being. —The Guardian
The best Spanish poet of the second half of the twentieth century.
Valente never put himself in the service of any party or
government. —Juan Goytisolo
Valente’s work is the radical adventure of solitude. Within these
words an entire life passes, an adventure decisively impassioned by
creation and solitary investigation. —ABC (Spain)
"[Valente's] is a furtive poetry, struggling to exist in the
interstices between the restrictions of a totalitarian regime and
the urge to speak, to bear witness, no matter how
obliquely.... It is to the translator’s credit that he has
been able to render Valente’s work faithfully without losing its
resonance across language and culture." — Pablo Medina, The
Brooklyn Rail
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