Antonio Machado

Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres

Paul Burns

Antonio Machado was born in Seville in 1885 and died in southern France early in 1939, escaping from the Nationalist advance in the Spanish Civil War. He is increasingly recognized as one of the four greatest Spanish-language poets of the twentieth century, but lack of adequate translations has limited his appreciation in the English-speaking world. Here a native Spanish and a native English speaker set out to remedy this deficiency. The beauty of his landscape, fused with its sadness as his young wifeAEs resting pace gave Machado his distinctive voice: intimate, elegiac, at once detached and involved, most characteristically expressed in Campos de Castilla (1917), from which many of the poems here selected are taken. The language of his poetry is spare, relying strongly on nouns and adjectives, asserting more than describing, equally anti-baroque and against the aeexcesses of modern cosmeticsAE (Self Portrait). His father had been a collector of folklore, and Machado saw the romance (ballad) tradition as lying at the heart of the authentic Spanish poetic tradition. English cannot recreate the assonance on which he relied, but this translation captures the essential rhythm as well as the poignancy of the original. Spanish text with facing-page translation, introduction and notes."

Campos de Castilla

Juan Ramón Jimenez (1881-1958) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, yet his work remains far less well-known in the English-speaking world than it deserves. Jimenez was a prolific writer - his collected verse fills twenty volumes - and his early poems were first published whilst still in his teens.

Juan Ramon Jimenez: Selected Poems (Poesias escogidas)

Federico García Lorca was born near Granada in 1898. Initially set on studying music in Paris, after his piano teacher died in 1916 he became involved in a literary and artistic group, including H G Wells and Rudyard Kipling. This move towards a more literary life eventually paid off.

Lorca: Blood Wedding

Juan Ramón Jiménez, 1956 winner of the Nobel Prize, published Platero and I in 1914. Like Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland , Platero and I is a book not only for children, but for adults as well. It is an allegory of the deepest human emotions.

Juan Ramon Jimenez: Platero and I

Eric Southworth

La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba) was one of the last plays to be written by Lorca, shortly before he was executed by the Franco regime at the age of 38, in 1936. It was not performed until 1945 several years after his death. Along with Blood Wedding and Yerma it forms Lorca's Rural Trilogy.

Lorca: The House of Bernarda Alba: A Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain

Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1967), Chile's 'other' great poet of the twentieth century, is little known outside the Spanish-speaking world, and unlike Pablo Neruda has not been extensively translated into English. She deserves better, particularly as the first Latin American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1945), and this selection of her poetry is designed to introduce her to an English-speaking public. Born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in the Elqui valley in the 'little north' of Chile, she became a schoolteacher at the age of fifteen and went on to become an educator of international renown, an architect of educational reform in Mexico, and a cultural administrator at the League of Nations. She began publishing prose and verse pieces in newspapers and reviews at about the same age. Four major collections of her poems were published in her lifetime: Desolacion (Desolation) in 1922, Ternura (Tenderness) in 1924, Tala (Felling) in 1938, and Lagar (Wine Press) in 1954, followed by Poema de Chile published after her death. Poems from each of these five collections are included here. The landscape and people of her native Chile are a constant theme in her work, even though she lived most of her adult life away from Chile, largely as a consul - unpaid for many years - in Europe, Brazil, and the U.S.A., where she died. Her great love of children, who were the main preoccupation of her life and whom she both understood and respected; motherhood, and her lack of it; loss of people she loved; religious faith, tested and at times unorthodox, are other abiding themes. Her language is direct, passionate, rooted in local usage. The whole of her work, in prose as well as in verse, is a reflection of the absolute integrity of her life.

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1967), Chile's 'other' great poet of the twentieth century, is little known outside the Spanish-speaking world, and unlike Pablo Neruda has not been extensively translated into English.

Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres

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