Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark: Spanish Poets in London (1811-2018)

I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide selection of poems written about London over the past two centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I couldn't find anything written earlier.

The poems had to be recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasn't about to enter into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have an explicit connection to the city. Sometimes London is the protagonist, sometimes the setting, and sometimes it represents an outside space which the poet interiorises, but it always remains a real place, an urban environment to accept as it is or to confront.

I didn't select the poems on the basis of form or style. Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark contains every kind of expression, tradition, sensibility and voice - the only benchmark for inclusion was quality. So the anthology, as well as being a balanced history, is also a display of the breadth of styles of current Spanish poetry, and of the poetry of the past.

The poems had to have been already published. I wasn't looking for new work, but for a significant historical record.

--Eduardo Moga

Eduardo Moga (Barcelona, 1962) holds a degree in Law and a PhD in Spanish Philology from the University of Barcelona. He has published 18 poetry collections, the main ones being La luz oída (1996), Las horas y los labios (2003), Cuerpo sin mí (2007), Bajo la piel, los días (2010), Insumisión (2013), El corazón, la nada (Antología poética 1994-2014) (2014) and Muerte y amapolas en Alexandra Avenue (2017). His poetry has been translated into English (Selected Poems, Shearsman Books, 2017), Portuguese, French, Catalan, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian and Albanian. He has translated Ramon Llull, Frank O'Hara, Évariste Parny, Charles Bukowski, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Rimbaud, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Richard Aldington and Jaume Roig, among other authors. He currently writes as a literary critic for Letras Libres, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Turia and Quimera, among other cultural media. He is responsible for the anthologies Los versos satíricos. Antología de poesía satírica universal (2001), Poesía pasión. Doce jóvenes poetas españoles (2004) and Medio siglo de oro. Antología de la poesía contemporánea en catalán (2014). He has also published travel books, such as La pasión de escribil (2013) and El mundo es ancho y diverso (2018); two selections of posts from his blog Corónicas de Ingalaterra (2015 and 2016), where he gathers his impressions of the two years and a half that he lived in London and, in general, of British society; and several volumes of essays, the most recent ones being La disección de la rosa (2015), Apuntes de un español sobre poetas de América (y algunos de otros sitios) (2016) and Homo legens (2018). He has been director of the Editora Regional de Extremadura and coordinator of the Reading Promotion Plan of Extremadura. He maintains the blogs Corónicas de Ingalaterra and Corónicas de Españia.

Terence Dooley is currently putting the finishing touches to an anthology of contemporary Spanish women poets for Shearsman Books. Previous translations include The Year of the Crab by Mariano Peyrou, and Selected Poems by Eduardo Moga.