Pere Gimferrer (Nyrb Poets)

A bilingual edition of poems by the award-winning Spanish poet.

Pere Gimferrer has been writing poetry for more than fifty years in several languages, restoring and expanding upon avant-garde tendencies in poetry that had been abandoned in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Of his second book, The Sea Aflame, Octavio Paz wrote: “Our language will be, already is, larger by one poet.” In 1970, with Mirrors, Gimferrer turned to Catalan, his mother tongue. Since then, he has won major Catalan and Spanish prizes for his work, which, along with poetry, includes writings on film and art history, translations, and novels. This bilingual volume, the first to draw on all phases of Gimferrer’s career as a poet—from Message from the Tetrarch, published when he was eighteen, to selections from his recent verses in Italian—is an ideal introduction to a writer who, in the words of Roberto Bolaño, “is a great poet and also knows everything.”

This bilingual edition includes the original French/German/Spanish versions of each poem.

Pere Gimferrer is the author of more than thirty books in Catalan, Spanish, and Italian. A member of the Real Academia Española and the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona, he has won numerous accolades for his work, including Spain’s National Poetry Prize and the Ramon Llull Novel Award.

Adrian Nathan West is a writer and literary translator living in Spain. He has translated books from German, Catalan, and Spanish, including Jean Améry’s Charles Bovary, Country Doctor, which is published by NYRB Classics. His novel My Father’s Diet will be published in 2021.