Book of the Cold

About the Author\nAntonio 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.\nKatherine 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's PREPOEMS IN POSTSPANISH AND OTHER POEMS (Action Books, 2021), Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez's FROM A RED BARN (co-im-press, 2020) and NIGHT BADLY WRITTEN: Poems 2000-2015 (Action Books, 2020), Legna Rodrigues Iglesias's TÍTULO/TITLE (Kenning Editions, 2020), 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 and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.\nVictor 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.\nBOOK 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, 'Fing 'a 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