Book of the Cold

"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 Rodrâiguez Nuänez 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, "Fingâia un rostro" becomes "Faked a face." And so in English, as in Spanish, the verb, not the subject, controls the sentence. - Forrest Gander"--