The Insistence of Harm - (Contemporary Spanish-Language Poetry in Translation) by Fernando Valverde (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published by Visor Libros, Madrid, 2014, as La insistencia del daäno.

Book Synopsis

Born in Granada, Spain, in 1980, Fernando Valverde is widely considered one of the top young poets writing in Spanish today. Valverde is a leading figure in a movement of contemporary poets known as the Poetry of Uncertainty, and he has received some of the most significant awards for poetry in Spanish. This bilingual edition of his book The Insistence of Harm introduces English-language readers to some of his latest, most exciting work. The Insistence of Harm is a series of poignant lyric poems that takes readers from India to the Balkans to Spain and to Latin America, exploring the nature of "harm" in its various guises--war, disease, heartbreak, suicide. The poems grapple with both the reality of loss and the distance that language imposes on it. The English translations by Allen Josephs and Laura Juliet Wood effectively capture both tone and content while attending to subtle nuances of the original Spanish, bringing a new and important voice to students of Spanish and poetry readers alike. A volume in the series Contemporary Spanish-Language Poetry in Translation, edited by Allen Josephs, funded by the University of West Florida

Review Quotes

"Voted the best Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly 200 professors of Hispanic literature across the globe, Valverde has been widely published and widely praised. This bilingual edition of an award-winning collection brings Valverde's brilliance into English for the first time, and the poems substantiate his reputation. The lyrics are, by turns, strikingly pithy ('The wreckage of war drinks dawn'), profoundly reflective ('I think sadness / is the land of man'), and suddenly surreal ('melancholy fish are now October moons'). As progenitor of the poetry of uncertainty, Valverde seeks to 'synthesize social concern and the deepest well of our existence, ' and his experiences reporting from the Balkans for the newspaper El País inform a number of poems. Figures like Bosnian historian Izet Sarajli and convicted Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladi, together with a town in Czech Republic, Kutná Hora, populate the poems. Valverde's gift for plumbing the deepest wells of human emotion stays grounded in lived reality, true to his aesthetic. This is a long-awaited and enlightening addition to contemporary Spanish-language poetry in translation."--Booklist

About the Author

Allen Josephs, University Research Professor in the Department of English at the University of West Florida, is cotranslator of Fernando Valverde's Selected Poems.