On Translating Antonio Gamoneda

Antonio Gamoneda was born in Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, in 1931. He grew up in León in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, witnessing firsthand the repression brought about by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in power from 1939 to 1975. Gamoneda left school definitively at fourteen, took a job as a messenger boy at a bank, and continued to work there in different capacities over the next twenty-four years.

Gamoneda was fiercely opposed to the Franco dictatorship and deeply involved in the resistance movement. While his first book was published in 1960, his next would only come out in 1977, after Franco’s death. It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that his work began to gather widespread attention, winning two prominent awards, including the National Poetry Prize. In 2006, he earned the two highest honors a poet can receive in the Spanish-speaking world, the Reina Sofía Poetry Prize and the Cervantes Prize. He is one of the few writers to obtain both in the same year.

Despite such accolades, Gamoneda is not a poet of the establishment. He is self-taught, working-class, insurgent; a truly extraordinary voice in post-Civil War Spain. His work is defiant: hermetic, elliptical, fragmented; words have no fixed meaning; readers must accept being co-creators. Accordingly, it offers an alternative to the so-called “poetry of experience,” the prevailing poetic trend in his country, which places great value on expressing “ordinary” experiences and is overly preoccupied with the common reader’s “enjoyment” of a text. 2003’s Arden la pérdidas (Burn the Losses) serves as an outstanding example of Gamoneda’s poetics.

For Gamoneda, poetic language only takes on meaning at the very moment it is spoken or written; language is the creator of consciousness and knowledge, and so we can only know after the words. This is what he calls “poetry’s reality.” Such openness, such plurality, such mutability are no doubt challenges for Gamoneda’s translators. And yet, translation—by its very nature interpretive—resists the idea that words say what they say and nothing more. What a privilege for us, then, to be called to co-create, to go deep into poetry’s possibilities.