Begun in 1939, barely four months after the close of the Spanish Civil War, these poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Vicente Aleixandre were written during a period of hardship and despair. In spite of his surroundings Aleixandre created the splendor of the shadow of a lost paradise that consisted of memory, nostalgia, yearning and illusion. This is the first full English version. The original Spanish text is included.

Shadow of Paradise

Literature & Fiction

Aleixandre, Vicente

Rodríguez, Claudio

Harter, Hugh A.

Poetry

University of California Press

A splash of sea foam. A sly sparrow. A man dodging the rain. From such mundane, unexpected moments, Spanish poet Claudio Rodríguez crafted his 1965 Alliance and Condemnation, a collection of poems that temper the joy of existence—the “bounty that turns my flawed breath into prayer”—with a questioning of empirical reality. In these pages are poems of love and hate, contrition and forgiveness, and the joys of sorrow and existence. Many of the poems are essentially parables that seem to address the immediacy of the world yet point beyond it toward philosophical and eternal values. The result is a conjoining of the real and the ideal, a frequent theme in Spanish literature. Many of these poems bridge the distance between the Spanish mystics, among them Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa, and the nature poetry of romanticism. Of all his creations, the radiant poems in Alliance and Condemnation offer the best imaginable introduction to his extraordinary life and work.

Alliance and Condemnation / Alianza y Condena

Swan Isle Press

The first substantial collection of Claudio Rodriguez's work in English offers the complete poems, in a bilingual edition. Translated by Michael Smith (also responsible for the Shearsman editions of Bécquer, Vallejo and Rosalía de Castro) and Luís Ingelmo (who worked on the Bécquer edition with Michael Smith), this is as good an introduction as it is possble to get for an unfamiliar, yet major literary figure. Perhaps the most important poet of the "50s" generation in Spain, Rodríguez's work deserves to be much better-known in the anglophone world.

Collected Poems

Shearsman Books

Desde mis poemas (Letras Hispanicas) (Spanish Edition)

History & Criticism

Ediciones Cátedra

Poesía completa (1953-1991)

Maxi-Tusquets

La otra palabra: Escritos en prosa

Tusquets Editores S.A.

Austral

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