Antonio Gamoneda,
Description of the Lie (Descripción de la mentira)
a bilingual edition edited and translated by Donald Wellman
with an essay by Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza
ISBN: 978-1-58498-106-0, $17.95
"It wasn’t until Franco’s death in 1975 that Gamoneda boldly returned to literary life after an interminable absence — the disappearance of the physical embodiment of Francoism propelled him to stage his own reappearance as an unshackled poet. In 1976, faced with a dire urgency for cathartic expression, Gamoneda composed the entirety of Description of the Lie in a radical poetic where, in translator Donald Wellman’s words, 'white space is crucial' and in which lyric voice 'emit[s] flashes of violence and unexpected tenderness' (3). Description not only formally 'represents Gamoneda’s poetic language at its most intense pitch,' but it also symbolically marks the decisive break with Spain’s tortured past that proved capable of articulating a language of mourning for its numberless disappeared and muted dead." --Jacket2
Description of the Lie is one of the few essential books from the last fifty years of Spanish poetry. Antonio Gamoneda, Cervantes Prize 2006, was born in Oviedo and, as a boy and young man, experienced the cruelest hardships of social and political oppression under the Franco dictatorship. This book, first published in 1977, bares the heart and soul of a Spain just beginning to recover from the horrors of those years. The poetry is rich in imagery drawn from the area of León where Gamoneda has lived most of his life and where he has raised his family. The book presents a unique instance of the local in all its richness and complexity serving as a liberating force. It embodies a truly national consciousness: loss, despair, compromise and recovery — aspects of Spain’s tragic twentieth century history. Description is the first in a series that includes Gravestones (Lapidás), also translated by Donald Wellman, and Book of the Cold (not yet released in English). Gamoneda’s work is valued world-wide for the incisive and innovative language with which human experience finds the necessary words for grappling with its meaning.
Donald Wellman, poet, editor, and translator lives in Weare, New Hampshire. His books of poetry include The Cranberry Island Series (Dos Madres 2012), A North Atlantic Wall (Dos Madres, 2010), and Prolog Pages (Ahadada, 2009). He has written on the work of poets associated withBlack Mountain College and with emergent contemporary practices. He edited O.ARS, a series of anthologies, devoted to topics bearing on postmodern poetics, including volumes entitled Coherence, Perception and Translations: Experiments in Reading. His translation of Enclosed Garden by Emilio Prados is available from Lavender Ink / Diálogos. His translation of Antonio Gamoneda’s Gravestones is available from the University of New Orleans Press.
Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, Lecturer in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, specializes in Modern Spanish Literature and Poetry, Historical Memory and Testimony, and Literary Translation. He has translated the works of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Samuel Beckett from English into Spanish.
“Wellman’s pitch-perfect ear for the sound of that passive-assertive voice of the enigma with which Celan among others made poetry, the voice steeped in a history it knows well enough to say “No” to, even as it unravels its own denial. Wellman’s English adds that dimension to English. …His translation introduces something extra, maybe a kind of poetic possibility that English has refused partake of (over and over), the assertive, emphatic line. English seems more conditional somehow, milder, more negotiable, open to things... Here we have the details of the history Gamoneda strips bare.” —Andrei Codrescu
“Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza and Donald Wellman— I cannot imagine two more sharp-eyed readers of this major Spanish poet who speaks darkly and urgently about truth and remembrance.” —Christopher Maurer (editor of Garcia Lorca, The Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition).
Of Gamoneda’s most recent work, Cancón errónea, Antonio Ortega, writing in El pais, claims, “Here is the whole of his writing, the inventory of his ‘immobilized words,’ reiterated and obsessive, threads like calculations, constructing a backbone for the continuous disorder of life. Poems in layers, fragments that are joined together and mounted. In this heart-rending, magisterial and powerful book, we don’t have literature, instead poetic counsel that intensifies our awareness, the clarity of knowing that we will ‘wake up / in oblivion.’”
“Description of the Lie … raised a generational voice of strange oracular resonances, a prophetic enunciation, without ironies or emotional reserve. Fifteen years later like a typhoon no one had foreseen, it precipitated a cycle of death, in three extraordinary titles on the theme of physical collapse: three extraordinary titles culminating, that the poet believed to discern in Libro del frío (1992).” —Ángel L. Prieto de Paula, “Pasión de indiferencia.” El Pais 03/11/2012.
Description of the Lie (Descripción de la mentira)
a bilingual edition edited and translated by Donald Wellman
with an essay by Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza
ISBN: 978-1-58498-106-0, $17.95
"It wasn’t until Franco’s death in 1975 that Gamoneda boldly returned to literary life after an interminable absence — the disappearance of the physical embodiment of Francoism propelled him to stage his own reappearance as an unshackled poet. In 1976, faced with a dire urgency for cathartic expression, Gamoneda composed the entirety of Description of the Lie in a radical poetic where, in translator Donald Wellman’s words, 'white space is crucial' and in which lyric voice 'emit[s] flashes of violence and unexpected tenderness' (3). Description not only formally 'represents Gamoneda’s poetic language at its most intense pitch,' but it also symbolically marks the decisive break with Spain’s tortured past that proved capable of articulating a language of mourning for its numberless disappeared and muted dead." --Jacket2
Description of the Lie is one of the few essential books from the last fifty years of Spanish poetry. Antonio Gamoneda, Cervantes Prize 2006, was born in Oviedo and, as a boy and young man, experienced the cruelest hardships of social and political oppression under the Franco dictatorship. This book, first published in 1977, bares the heart and soul of a Spain just beginning to recover from the horrors of those years. The poetry is rich in imagery drawn from the area of León where Gamoneda has lived most of his life and where he has raised his family. The book presents a unique instance of the local in all its richness and complexity serving as a liberating force. It embodies a truly national consciousness: loss, despair, compromise and recovery — aspects of Spain’s tragic twentieth century history. Description is the first in a series that includes Gravestones (Lapidás), also translated by Donald Wellman, and Book of the Cold (not yet released in English). Gamoneda’s work is valued world-wide for the incisive and innovative language with which human experience finds the necessary words for grappling with its meaning.
Donald Wellman, poet, editor, and translator lives in Weare, New Hampshire. His books of poetry include The Cranberry Island Series (Dos Madres 2012), A North Atlantic Wall (Dos Madres, 2010), and Prolog Pages (Ahadada, 2009). He has written on the work of poets associated withBlack Mountain College and with emergent contemporary practices. He edited O.ARS, a series of anthologies, devoted to topics bearing on postmodern poetics, including volumes entitled Coherence, Perception and Translations: Experiments in Reading. His translation of Enclosed Garden by Emilio Prados is available from Lavender Ink / Diálogos. His translation of Antonio Gamoneda’s Gravestones is available from the University of New Orleans Press.
Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, Lecturer in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, specializes in Modern Spanish Literature and Poetry, Historical Memory and Testimony, and Literary Translation. He has translated the works of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Samuel Beckett from English into Spanish.
“Wellman’s pitch-perfect ear for the sound of that passive-assertive voice of the enigma with which Celan among others made poetry, the voice steeped in a history it knows well enough to say “No” to, even as it unravels its own denial. Wellman’s English adds that dimension to English. …His translation introduces something extra, maybe a kind of poetic possibility that English has refused partake of (over and over), the assertive, emphatic line. English seems more conditional somehow, milder, more negotiable, open to things... Here we have the details of the history Gamoneda strips bare.” —Andrei Codrescu
“Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza and Donald Wellman— I cannot imagine two more sharp-eyed readers of this major Spanish poet who speaks darkly and urgently about truth and remembrance.” —Christopher Maurer (editor of Garcia Lorca, The Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition).
Of Gamoneda’s most recent work, Cancón errónea, Antonio Ortega, writing in El pais, claims, “Here is the whole of his writing, the inventory of his ‘immobilized words,’ reiterated and obsessive, threads like calculations, constructing a backbone for the continuous disorder of life. Poems in layers, fragments that are joined together and mounted. In this heart-rending, magisterial and powerful book, we don’t have literature, instead poetic counsel that intensifies our awareness, the clarity of knowing that we will ‘wake up / in oblivion.’”
“Description of the Lie … raised a generational voice of strange oracular resonances, a prophetic enunciation, without ironies or emotional reserve. Fifteen years later like a typhoon no one had foreseen, it precipitated a cycle of death, in three extraordinary titles on the theme of physical collapse: three extraordinary titles culminating, that the poet believed to discern in Libro del frío (1992).” —Ángel L. Prieto de Paula, “Pasión de indiferencia.” El Pais 03/11/2012.