José Ángel Valente is renowned as a platonist of the word who seeks to strip bare received language, producing beautiful, vitalized texts of absolute immediacy

José Ángel Valente, Landscape with Yellow Birds, Trans. by Tom Christensen. Archipelago Books, 2012.

Widely considered to be Spain’s greatest postwar poet, Valente is renowned as a platonist of the word who seeks to strip bare received language, producing beautiful, vitalized texts of absolute immediacy. Carlos Casares, president of the Galician Cultural Council, called Valente “one of the principal figures of Spanish poetry,” and indeed, his tendency toward metapoetry became a signal characteristic of his generation of poets in Spain. He was awarded the Premio Adonais for poetry in 1954, the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras in 1988, the Premio de la Fundacion Pablo Iglesias in 1984, the Premio Reina Sofia de Poesia Iberoamericana in 1993, the Recibio el Premio de la Critica in 1960 and 1990, and the Premio Nacional de Literatura posthumously in 2000. This is the first major collection of Valente's poetry to appear in English.


"Spain’s greatest contemporary poet.—The Independent

"Considered by many to be the major poet of postwar Spain—the primary heir of Machado, Jiménez, García Lorca, and Cernuda—José Ángel Valente has taken a long time to reach English, but Thomas Christensen’s crystalline translation has made it worth the wait.—Eliot Weinberger

"His work retains recurring notes of critical protest, but these are driven less by the conditions of life in postwar Spain than by general ethical and philosophical preoccupations. Valente reveals the conviction that poetry starts with the word, rather than external reality. His tendency toward metapoetry rapidly became a signal characteristic of his generation of poets.—Douglass M. Rogers
"Valente's work is the radical adventure of solitude. Within these words an entire life passes by, an adventure decisively impassioned by creation and solitary investigation.—ABC (Spain)

"The best Spanish poet of the second half of the twentieth century. Valente never put himself in the service of any party or government.—Juan Goytisolo

"Valente exemplified poetic integrity, pushing poetry into terrains that compete with religious, mystical, and Heideggerian notions of inner being.—The Guardian

"One of the most important poets of postwar literature. Valente's work ... answers to a single commitment: with the word.—El País (Spain)

Landscape with Yellow Birds—the title is from the Paul Klee painting –is a well-conceived collection of poems selected from 17 books of José Ángel Valente’s poetry, ranging from A Modo de Esperanza (In a Hopeful Mode, 1953–1954), Mr. Valente’s first volume of poetry, to Fragmentos de un Libro Futuro (Fragments from a Future Book, 1991–2000) which includes poems written prior to his death in 2000.
Born in 1929 in Spain, Mr. Valente took a degree from the University of Madrid in 1953. Given that his family was in diminished standing with Franco, he lived abroad for many years, originally in Oxford, where he taught, then in Geneva, and finally in Paris. During all these years, Mr. Valente wrote poetry and published critical articles. He eventually returned to Spain in 1986, taking up residence in Andalusia.
Tom Christensen has prepared a penetrating and complete Translator’s Preface, summarizing Mr. Valente’s biographical details and covering critical areas of the poetry itself, placing Mr. Valente’s work in perspective relative to the Spanish poetry of his time.
Various critics agree that while Mr. Valente’s early poetry was associated with the so-called “Generation of the 1950s,” a poetry characterized by Spanish social consciousness, his subsequent work moved closer to the Modernist tradition.
One inescapable fact remains: Mr. Valente’s poems as selected and arranged in this collection demonstrate a seamless whole, a unity in which the earlier poems introduce themes and motifs that reappear with renewed intensity and increasing development throughout the collection.
Mr. Valente uses his extensive aesthetic vocabulary to work and rework variations on a series of themes: darkness and shadow, ashes and memory, death and passion, blindness and solitude. Themes that engaged the poet in his youth remain central to his mature work.
These are poems to be read slowly, filled as they are with nuanced appeals for deeper and deeper reflection. The repetitive patterns and rhythms in many of these poems reinforce, and as they close or resolve, illustrate Mr. Valente’s continued quest for self-discovery.
This is a poet obsessed by love, love in all of its joy and passion, love in its darkness, its pain, and its desperation. Mr. Valente understands that love is not afraid to wound, to draw blood. His poetry opens the reader “The way the body of wounded love was opened/like a bird of fire/ignited by blind hands.”
These lines from “Material Memory,” 1977–1978, unite passion with pain, blindness with fire. Written at the mid-mark of Mr. Valente’s poetic career, this quote embodies the mysticism, the opening-up to the sacred that reflects his growing interest in Heideggerian philosophy.
Any collection of poems spanning 17 volumes of verse and a lifetime of aesthetic and scholarly achievement is bound to present a challenge, both to the editors of the volume and to the reader. Many poems must be left out of such a volume. The arrangement of the poems selected requires careful judgment and acute linguistic sensitivity, particularly in view of the additional layer of complexity imposed by the fact that this collection is a translation.
Despite these challenges the editors and the translator have done a very creditable job in producing a manuscript of smoothly interwoven and carefully translated poems that furnish the English language reader with an excellent picture of Mr. Valente’s work—a remarkable synthesis that grows and deepens with each reading.
Mr. Valente’s imagery develops over the decades into a ritual creativity of dark mysteries, shadows of the sacred: “At dusk the unseen hand of a god removes you like the wing of a bird fallen into dense shadows beyond the shadows. You are dissolved, finally, within your own gaze.”
This quote is from The Singer Does Not Awaken, 1992, Part II: “Landscape with yellow birds,” a series of Mr. Valente’s mature prose poems, poems that combine the lyrical certainty of sure poetic craft with the mystical tension—both physical and psychological—of this consummate Spanish poet.
This collection is not only an important contribution to Spanish-language poetry in translation, it is a passionate joy to read. - Laverne Frith

Jose Angel Valente, a cerebral Spaniard who believed writing poetry should begin with the word and not with the real-life world, died on July 18 in a hospital in Geneva. He was 71.
He had cancer, The Associated Press reported.
The poet, who was also a critic and translator, wrote his poetry in Spanish and in Galician, a regional tongue in Spain's northwest, where he was born.
''There is no doubt that he was one of the principal figures of Spanish poetry'' in the 20th century, Carlos Casares, a man of letters who is president of the Galician Cultural Council, said after the poet's death.
Douglass M. Rogers, a retired professor of Spanish at the University of Texas, said: ''Jose Angel Valente was one of the earliest Spanish poets to reveal a clear and promising departure from the rhetorical excesses of the poetry of social realism dominant in post-Civil War Spain by the 1950's. His work retains recurring notes of critical protest, but these are driven less by the conditions of life in postwar Spain than by general ethical and philosophical preoccupations.'' - Eric Pace

The Spanish poet José Angel Valente, who has died aged 71, wrote at two removes from the harsh realities of his homeland; firstly, by living in exile during the Franco era, and secondly by contemplating being and the nature of poetry itself rather than more obvious political themes.
Born in Orense, an "obscure" town in Galicia, Valente claimed that his biography lay in his poetry, but aspects of his external life aid understanding of his work. The civil war and Franco's dictatorship marked him, especially when his Falangist father fell foul of the regime. There are no yearnings for a return to that childhood in his poems - although he wrote Cántigas de alén (Songs of long ago, 1989) in Galician.
He went on to study law in Santiago de Compostela, and graduated in romance philology at the University of Madrid in 1953, with a prize. From 1955-58 he taught and earned an MA at Oxford; from 1958-75, he translated for the World Health Organisation in Geneva, before moving to Paris, where he worked from 1975-86 for Unesco.
After that, he lived between Geneva and Almería, with its desert landscapes and the nearby Cabo de Gata national park. His life's work as a poet in self-exile was finally recognised in Spain when he won the prestigious Príncipe de Asturias prize in 1988, and then the National Poetry prize in 1993. None of his books has yet been translated into English. Many of those who grew up under Franco became politicised poets, but Valente turned to writing meta-poetry about the inner processes of poetry itself because he was a "poet in times of misery" who had to re-think what poetry meant in the corruption of language under Franco.
The practice of writing and translating poetry became his self-defence, and path to the enigma of inner knowledge. Franco's shadow drove him into "poverty and exile", living in what he called the "extrapatria", outside Spain.
He published the first of more than 20 books, A modo de esperanza (In hopeful mode, 1955), after winning the Adonais poetry prize; his second book, Poemas a Lázaro (Poems to Lazarus, 1960), won the Premio de la Critica, and in 1980 he won the prize for the second time with Tres lecciones de tinieblas (Three lessons of Tenebrae).
Last year his complete poems, Obra poética, appeared in two volumes. Apart from his poetry, Valente translated and collected his short, acute essays on Spanish mystics and others. He enjoyed collaborating on books with painters such as Eduardo Chillida (a fellow Galician), Antoni Tàpies and Antonio Saura.
Over the years, rather than any sudden shifts, there was a pruning of the non-essential, edging towards meditative fragments. His later work requires concentration, is religious in its seeking of a poetic sacred - or better, its continuous absence. Valente emphasises "not understanding", a relentless verbal deconditioning, a focusing on "attentiveness". This is summarised in a brief 1989 poem: To rub oneself out. / Only in the absence of any sign / does the god land.
Valente never courted popularity, wrote outside Hispanic fashions and in-groups, but was considered by writers like Juan Goytisolo to be Spain's most dedicated poet; a poet's poet elaborating an austere ethic of creativity. He exemplified poetic integrity, pushing poetry into terrains that compete with religious, mystical and Heideggerian notions of inner being. His poetry picks up the challenge of the great, acerbic 17th-century writer Francisco de Quevedo; it expands Juan Ramón Jiménez's "pure poetry" and Antonio Machado's philosophical colloquialism, and integrates the self-denying, laconic Peruvian, César Vallejo.
From these he learned self-belittlement, direct references and rhythms, and an aesthetics of verbal poverty in the form of a critique of superfluous words, similes and metaphors. His work is contemplative, emanating from the darkness of the solitary self, without ever pandering to the sensual baroque of the Spanish poetic tradition embodied by Lorca and Neruda.
In his introspective poetry there are no easy answers, for he denies the possibility of understanding anything. Key terms such as "to be unaware", "emptiness", "silence" and "loneliness" convey his constant self-examination; poets are "divers into emptiness". In the poem Obituary, we read: In the centre of his heart, the burial mound which he himself had raised with the years remained shut forever.
A poem of 1970 could be an epitaph: He performed three exercises / to dissolve his ego, / and on the fourth found himself alone / with his eyes fixed on an answer / that nobody could give him .
Many poems explore this inner vacuum, and the lack of references outside the poem itself makes all his work, not anecdotally autobiographical, but the biography of a mind.
Valente was twice married, with four children, two of whom predeceased him. - Jason Wilson