Pere Gimferrer

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. This bilingual edition, 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.”