Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets

$19.95

Edited by by Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve

During the post-civil war era, General Francisco Franco’s fascist government forbade the people of Spain’s Catalonia region from speaking, reading, and writing in Catalan, a crime punishable by imprisonment or execution. Throughout these years, the work of Catalan poets could only be found via the underground. Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve traveled to meet each of the poets featured in this anthology, embarking on the long road of joy, pain, and friendship that is the work of translation. These fourteen poets, like fourteen blackbirds, provide keen angles of perception in beautiful and lyrical poetry, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes nostalgic, and always engaging, until now almost entirely unknown to U.S readers.

Edited by by Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve

During the post-civil war era, General Francisco Franco’s fascist government forbade the people of Spain’s Catalonia region from speaking, reading, and writing in Catalan, a crime punishable by imprisonment or execution. Throughout these years, the work of Catalan poets could only be found via the underground. Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve traveled to meet each of the poets featured in this anthology, embarking on the long road of joy, pain, and friendship that is the work of translation. These fourteen poets, like fourteen blackbirds, provide keen angles of perception in beautiful and lyrical poetry, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes nostalgic, and always engaging, until now almost entirely unknown to U.S readers.

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Advanced Praise

“Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets is an astonishingly generous collection that teaches us how to take a hurt and make it into a song, teaches us how a private whisper can become everyone’s private whisper, how a poem in Catalan can become an equally beautiful, terrifying, inspiring poem in English. What a gorgeous, necessary book. Bravo.” — Ilya Kaminsky, Author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve have performed a magnificent service by bringing us these sensitive, fluid translations of poets whose work, in most cases, I had not previously encountered. I loved reading this book and will be looking for more work by many of these writers. This is a superb and important collection.” —Steve Yarbrough

“In a world that is simultaneously being cut to the bone while getting more dogmatic in pockets, this collection is a promise for communing with the unexplored peregrine.” —The London Magazine

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-946482-16-7