de Gloria

When Julio Martínez Mesanza’s most recent book Gloria (The Glory) was chosen for the 2017 Spanish National Prize in poetry, the judges cited the depth of its enterprise, its “formal beauty,” and its ability to “breathe new air into the classical tradition,” among other strengths. They also praised the book as an act of “rebellion” against current modes of thought. Though a prominent member of what Spanish critics call the Generation of the Eighties, Martínez Mesanza has been writing against the grain of contemporary trends for almost forty years, and Gloria, from which these translations are taken, marks a culmination of his career to date.

One thing that differentiates Martínez Mesanza from others of his generation is the remarkable unity of his work in subject matter, themes, and style. Broadly defined, his poetry is concerned with spiritual and ethical issues in Western civilization. It reflects an ongoing engagement with European history and mythology from classical times to the present.

Perhaps the most noticeable element of Martínez Mesanza’s style is his consistent use of unrhymed endecasílabos, or eleven-syllable lines, a meter common in Golden Age literature but fairly unusual in Spanish poetry today. A rough equivalent in English poetry would be blank verse, and that meter underlies these translations. I’ve been translating Martínez Mesanza’s poetry for well over a decade at this point, and I continue to be struck by its unique, consistent voice—there is no one I know in contemporary Spanish poetry who sounds at all like him. His vocabulary is unadorned and precise, his rhetorical stance uninflated, and his syntax direct. The overall effect is one of measured deliberation: an exploration of feelings and moral concerns, reflective but not overly self-conscious, in a well-paced music that engages the past and speaks to our own time with clarity and grace. Rendering his distinctive voice and tone has been one of my primary concerns as a translator.