Description
BOOK OF THE COLD is the long-overdue English translation of legendary Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda’s 1992 long poem—a 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 Gamoneda’s mature poetry. His evocative sensual palette—the scent, feel, taste, and sound of conflicted experience, a lurching between the repellent and the irresistible—is 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 Rodríguez Núñez 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, 'Fingía un rostro' becomes 'Faked a face.' And so in English, as in Spanish, the verb, not the subject, controls the sentence." — Forrest Gander
"Antonio Gamoneda’s BOOK OF THE COLD, a long poem in the modernist tradition, is an undisputed masterpiece by Spain’s greatest living poet. In this sensitive and alert translation, Hedeen and Núñez have captured the epic sweep of Gamoneda’s distinctive cadences, halfway between prose and verse. This translation, long overdue, will reveal the full extent of Gamoneda’s genius to English-speaking readers." — Jonathan Mayhew
“A book-length prose poem musing on life, death, illness, and suicide told over seven sections, in a format that almost dictates how it should be read: a few lines per page to set in place images and feelings, with the remaining negative space on each page a place for reflective, performative meditation of the scene.” — Tom Bowden, The Book Beat
“The poems in Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold can help us sense these intimations of something else, not another form of authority, but something other than ourselves; it can only be seen clearly in the darkness. But that does not mean this light is any less real.” – Peter Valente, Heavy Feather Review
Poetry. Translation.
Author Bio
Antonio Gamoneda was born in Oviedo, Asturias, Spain in 1931 and grew up in León. Gamoneda was deeply involved in the resistance movement opposed to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in power from 1939 to 1975. His first book was published in 1960 and shortlisted for the Adonais Prize. He did not bring out another book until 1977. His work only began to receive the attention it deserved after he was awarded the Castilla y León Poetry Prize in 1985 and the National Poetry Prize in 1987. In 2006, Gamoneda received the two highest honors a writer can receive in the Spanish-speaking world, the Reina Sofía Poetry Prize and the Cervantes Prize. Self- taught and prolific, a unique voice in post-Civil War Spanish poetry, he continues to be a vital and powerful poetic presence in Spain and throughout the world.
Author City: MADRID SPA
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Managing Editor for Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana) is one of Cuba's most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over fifty collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Spanish-speaking region, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. He has been a riveting presence at the most important international literary festivals, having read in more than forty countries. In the last decade, his work has developed an enthusiastic readership in the US and the UK, where he has published seven book-length translations. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.
Author City: GAMBIER, OH USA