NYRB Poets: "Pere Gimferrer," with translator Adrian Nathan West & Edwin Frank

Adrian Nathan West joins us to present his new translation of the poetry of Pere Gimferrer, in conversation with NYRB Poets editor Edwin Frank. This program is part of our ongoing series with NYRB and took place on Zoom.
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A new English translation of poems by the award-winning Spanish poet.
Pere Gimferrer has been writing poetry for more than fifty years in several languages, restoring and expanding upon avant-garde tendencies in poetry that had been abandoned in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Of his second book, The Sea Aflame, Octavio Paz wrote: “Our language will be, already is, larger by one poet.” In 1970, with Mirrors, Gimferrer turned to Catalan, his mother tongue. Since then, he has won major Catalan and Spanish prizes for his work, which, along with poetry, includes writings on film and art history, translations, and novels. The present volume, the first to draw on all phases of Gimferrer’s career as a poet-from Message from the Tetrarch, published when he was eighteen, to selections from his recent verses in Italian-is an ideal introduction to a writer who, in the words of Roberto Bolaño, “is a great poet and also knows everything.”
Pere Gimferrer is the author of more than thirty books in Catalan, Spanish, and Italian. A member of the Real Academia Española and the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona, he has won numerous accolades for his work, including Spain’s National Poetry Prize and the Ramon Llull Novel Award.
Adrian Nathan West is a writer and literary translator living in Spain. He has translated books from German, Catalan, and Spanish, including Jean Améry’s Charles Bovary, Country Doctor, which is published by NYRB Classics, and Pere Gimferrer for NYRB Poets. His translation of Benjamìn Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (forthcoming from NYRB Classics in September 2021) is shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. His novel My Father’s Diet will be published in 2021.
Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics and NYRB Poets series and the author of a book of poems, Snake Train.