Landscape with Yellow Birds
Winner of Spain’s Premio Nacional de LiteraturaConsidered by many to be the major poet of postwar Spain—the primary heir of Machado, Jiménez, García Lorca, and Cernuda—José Ángel Valente has taken a long time to reach English, but Thomas Christensen’s crystalline translation has made it worth the wait. —Eliot WeinbergerOne of the most important poets of postwar literature. Valente’s work . . . answers to a single commitment: with the word. —El PaísValente exemplified poetic integrity, pushing poetry into terrains that compete with religious, mystical, and Heideggerian notions of inner being. —The GuardianThe best Spanish poet of the second half of the twentieth century. Valente never put himself in the service of any party or government. —Juan GoytisoloValente’s work is the radical adventure of solitude. Within these words an entire life passes, an adventure decisively impassioned by creation and solitary investigation. —ABC (Spain)"[Valente's] is a furtive poetry, struggling to exist in the interstices between the restrictions of a totalitarian regime and the urge to speak, to bear witness, no matter how obliquely.... It is to the translator’s credit that he has been able to render Valente’s work faithfully without losing its resonance across language and culture." — Pablo Medina,The Brooklyn Rail