by Antonio Gamoneda
Translated by Donald Wellman

 

ISBN: 1-60801-002-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-60801-002-8

 

Paper, 160 pages, 5.25 x 8.5 inches

$18.95

October, 2009

This translation of Lápidas makes available in English for the first time the poetry of Antonio Gamoneda, recipient of the Cervantes Prize in 2006 and now, despite years of repression under the Franco regime, one of the most respected voices in Spain. American readers will find that Gamoneda’s poetry, beautifully and skillfully rendered in Donald Wellman’s English translation, communicates not only the painful emotions of Franco-era Spain but also the fortitude of the Spanish people in their struggle.

---

In the calm of mothers who lean over the abyss.
In those flowers that closed themselves before they were seared by misfortune, after the horses had learned to cry.
In the moistness of the old.
In the yellow matter of the heart.  (p. 13)

---

Click here to view video of Antonio Gamoneda, Donald Wellman, and German translator Manuel Boes reading from his work in a trilingual reading.

---

One should be glad for Gamoneda’s belated recognition and simply shrug one’s shoulders over the timing, since that seems to be the lot of great poets. One should concentrate on a poetry that “travels from the visible to the invisible” and vice versa. A poetry not prone to expletives, resentment, nor the exploitation of personal grievances. A poetry that can deal with, in the words of Eduardo Milán, “the intimacy of exclusion” objectively yet passionately, language transparent and yet complex. Translator Donald Wellman’s sensitivity to these nuances and complexities serves these poems well.
—José Kozer

We have no other poetry among us so thoroughly cold yet so conscious of suffering.
—Carlos Piera

[Gamoneda] has made himself into one of the most forceful defenders of the besieged language, massacred by insatiable forces of destruction, by politicians, journalists, publicists, informers.… He has taken on the responsibility of transforming words into fire and sulfur, lightning and streams of ice in his Gravestones. Shepherds and surveyors, pregnant women about to give birth, laborers, marketers on Wednesdays, salesmen during the work week, people crucified on rough sticks the tunics of the penitents, old women at their useless prayers, the dying, lovers and beggars, falls and winters so endless and ephemeral, sparrow hawks and geraniums, merchants and sellers of trinkets, all come together in a universe of the word in which person and poet are forged in an identical passion.
—Andrés Sorel

 

---