Description
Poetry. Environmental Studies. THE UPLANDS: BOOK OF THE COUREL AND OTHER POEMS by the great Galician poet Uxío Novoneyra, translated by Erín Moure. Novoneyra is a poet and man of the land, and stands with Lorca as a poetic visionary of 20th century Spain. He was devoted to his region, the mountainous Courel, to its variant of Galician and to its names and ways, as well as to Galician culture as a whole, to the expression of all minority cultures and to freedom from imperialism, war, and economic expansionism. His œuvre—rich in sound, syllable, silence and gesture—reveals him as an eco-poet before the concept existed. Os Eidos [THE UPLANDS], first published in 1955 and still in print today, is his monumental work.
Author Bio
Erín Moure is a poet and translator living in Montréal. Her translation of Galician poet Lupe Gómez, Camouflage (Circumference Books, 2019) was a finalist for a 2020 Best Translated Book Award. Her latest book is The Elements (Anansi, 2019) and her latest translations are Uxío Novoneyra's The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz Books, 2020) from Galician and This Radiant Life (Book*hug, 2020) from the French of Chantal Neveu.
Author City: MONTREAL USA
Uxío Novoneyra (1930-1999) was one of the greatest Galician poets of the 20th century. Steadfast in defense of his Galician language and culture in the face of the homogenizing forces of centralist Spain, he produced a poetic œuvre rich in sound, syllable, silence, and gesture. He was a poet of Courelian Galician, a man of a remote mountain heritage and accent shaped over thousands of years before it arrived in his chest and mouth and on his tongue. Influenced by the medieval Iberian troubadours and by poetries from Persia and China to the Caribbean, through the Old Testament bumping against the Beats, Novoneyra was devoted to language and to all that speaks outside language but that language yearns to bring into mention. Having lived the brutal decades of Francoist dictatorship in Spain, he spoke always on behalf of freedom and the rights of peoples. He saw popular culture and language as essential to any avant-garde. He was a poet of the Land, of the equality of grasses and human being, of the weather, of the stones. Today we'd call him an eco-poet. He was a poet of silence, of re-envisioning; his classic The Uplands (1955, still in print) was one he wrote through as a life-work. Virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Novoneyra is a towering presence, even twenty years after his death, in Galicia. His spirit of defiance and of love is still alive in Galician poetry today.
Author City: GALACIA SPA