A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre - Softcover

Aleixandre, Vicente

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155659254X ISBN 13: 9781556592546

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2007

Synopsis

“For the Nobel Prize to come to Aleixandre now is fitting, not only because of the energy and intensity of his own poetry, but because it comes at this moment in Spanish history.”—The New York Times

A Longing for the Light is the only available bilingual Spanish-English translation of the poetry of Nobel Laureate Vicente Aleixandre. The collection spans the entirety of Aleixandre’s career—from early surrealist work to his complex and fascinating “dialogues.” It also contains prose interludes, an introduction by editor Lewis Hyde, and a descriptive bibliography.

Aleixandre was a member of Spain’s “Generation of 27” and was one of the few writers to remain in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. His passive but staunch political independence kept his writings banned for a decade, but his vivid poems of harmony and commonality would eventually symbolize much of what post-Civil War Spain aspired toward. As Aleixandre wrote in his Nobel lecture: “The poet, the truly determinative poet, is always a revealer; he is, essentially, a seer, a prophet.”

From “With All Due Respect”:

I don’t notice our clothes. Do you?
Dressed up in three-hundred burlap suits,
wrapped in my roughest heaviest get-up,
I maintain a dawn-like dignity and brag of how much I know about nakedness.

Vicente Aleixandre won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. He died in Madrid in 1984.

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Spanish (translation)

Review:

After Love
At The Bottom Of The Well: The Buried Man
Bent Time
Between Two Nighttimes, Lightning
Blood
The Body And The Soul
The Boy And The Man
The Bull
City Of Paradise
The Class
Close To Death
Closed
Come Always, Come
The Comet
Doesn't Know
The Dream
The Eagles
The Ear - The Word
The Explosion
Final Look: Death And Recognition
Guitar Or Moon
The Hands
Her Hand Given Over
Human Matter
I Am Destiny
If Someone Could Have Told Me
The Immortals: 1. Rain
The Immortals: 2. Sun
The Immortals: 3. Word
The Immortals: 4. Earth
The Immortals: 5. Fire
The Immortals: 6. Air
The Immortals: 7. Sea
In The Square
It's Raining
The Jungle And The Sea
Life
Lightless
The Limit
Love Poem
Man Doesn't Exist
The Man On His Death Bed: 1. Words
The Man On His Death Bed: 2. The Silence
Mother, Mother
My Grandfather's Death
My Voice
The Old And The Young
The Old Man And The Sun
The Old Man Is Like Moses
On The Death Of Miguel Hernandez
On The Way To School
The Poet
Sea And Night
Sea And Sunrise
Song To A Dead Girl
Sound Of The War
To My Dog
Tragic Destiny
The Tree
Under The Ground
The Usual
The Victorious Sun
Vision Of Youth From Other Years
The Visitor
The Waltz
We Feed On Shadow
What Happens To All Flesh
What Is Forgotten
Who I Write For
Wholeness Within Her
With All Due Respect
The Years
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

This bilingual collection of 68 poems and two prose pieces surveys fifty years of the 1977 Nobel Prize winning poet's work. In addition, the book includes Lewis Hyde's introduction and a descriptive bibliography containing Aleixandre's own comments on each of his books, taken from their prefaces. Divided into five sections to represent different phases of the poet's writing, arranged chronologically, the poems reflect quite a range to the talent, from the early prose poems to the recent dramatic poems, from the hermetic and surrealistic to the perhaps most occasional, "On the Death of Miguel Hernandez," ("Don't Touch him. None of you could. He knew,/ only he knew,") to love poems like "It's Raining": "This evening it's raining, and my picture of you is raining. The day falls open in memory. You walked in. / I can't hear. Memory gives me nothing but your picture. / There only your kiss or the rain is falling." The translations, by Hyde along with 14 other translators, at their best manage to capture the sharp images and intellect of this amazing, renowned poet, who, at age 88, continues to write. This edition, the first paperback printing of the 1979 Harper and Row cloth edition (now out of print) is the only book of Aleixandre's poetry available in English currently. Highly recommended for all collections. -- From Independent Publisher

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 155659254X
• ISBN 13: 9781556592546
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 320