Description

Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen andVctor Rodrguez-Nez (World Poetry Books, paperback)

Publication Date: May 10, 2022

Publisher Marketing: BOOK OF THE COLD is the long-overdue English translation of legendary Spanish poet Antonio Gamonedas 1992 long poema surreal, folkloric, modernist masterpiece between poetry and prose.

“When a younger generation of Spanish poets began to awaken and stretch their creative limbs at the dawn of a post-Franco era, what they found, intensified by decades of resistance and years of silence, was the beacon of Antonio Gamonedas mature poetry. His evocative sensual palettethe scent, feel, taste, and sound of conflicted experience, a lurching between the repellent and the irresistibleis virtually without comparison. But the real miracle of his work is how he combines that flashy richness with such syntactical concision, and with a folkloric strangeness peculiar to his work alone. The extraordinary translation by Katherine Hedeen and Victor Rodrguez Nez maintains the compression of the Spanish by often allowing the agency carried by a Spanish verb to be absorbed completely into the English verb. So, for example, ‘Finga un rostro’ becomes ‘Faked a face.’ And so in English, as in Spanish, the verb, not the subject, controls the sentence.” Forrest Gander

“Antonio Gamonedas BOOK OF THE COLD, a long poem in the modernist tradition, is an undisputed masterpiece by Spains greatest living poet. In this sensitive and alert translation, Hedeen and Nez have captured the epic sweep of Gamonedas distinctive cadences, halfway between prose and verse. This translation, long overdue, will reveal the full extent of Gamonedas genius to English-speaking readers.” Jonathan Mayhew