Description

Leopoldo María Panero

Translated by Arturo Mantecón

The Death of Poetry

ISBN: 9781956921366

(pbk., 326 pages, 7×10 inches)

(February, 2025, preorder available) 

Leopoldo María Panero, one of the most influential poets of 20th century Spain, was born in 1948 in Madrid to Leopoldo Panero, who was one of the favored poets of Franco’s Fascist regime. He showed precocious talent from an early age and also soon rebelled against his parents’ politics, serving a brief jail sentence in 1965 for participation in a communist-backed demonstration.

Because his mother observed signs of schizophrenia, and because she thought his homosexuality (which became apparent during his stay in jail) might be “cured,” she put him under psychiatric care, including electroshock treatments, an experience that would haunt him the rest of his life, which he would spend in and out of various asylums and institutions.

Despite the trauma inflicted by the institutions, he went on to write dozens of well-respected books of poetry, fiction, essays, very few of which have been translated into English. He died, just as interest in his work was enjoying a resurgence, in 2014.

(Adapted from the Introduction by Arturo Mantecón.)

The poetry is tremendous. Any person concerned with the human condition must read Panero. With maturity, humility, and courage, Mantecón has rendered Panero’s poetry in an English that reverberates with equal vitality. His is the prophetic voice of the Decadents whose songs of decay, hypocrisy, and moral corruption are called ravings by those who don’t heed their warning.”

—Lucina Schell, author of Reading in Translation

Wretchedness and grace, clarity, madness, Panero’s world is our world, his pained (soul) pilgrimages become daggers and serpents against us. What kind of poet bears this? Who can survive and live writing such satanic, angelic verse? Panero’s vision is breathtaking, sublime, horrifying. Art Mantecón’s superb translations brilliantly release that extraordinary and furious voice into the Anglophone world. Rejoice. Beware.

—Mark Statman, author of Hechizo and Volverse / Volver