The Book, Behind the Dune by Andrés Sánchez Robayna
PBS Recommended Translation - Spring 2017
Translated from Spanish by Louis Bourne.
The Book, Behind the Dune is a long unitary poem about the birth of a poetic consciousness and its development in a world marked by the discovery of beauty, eroticism and the reality of evil. Influenced by St. Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing and Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the poem, full of literary, artistic and philosophical references, is simultaneously a meditation on the meaning of time and its manifestations—its epiphanies—in a concrete life. The reflection on historical time leads the poet to the reality of “the pain of the world,” but also towards a world that is incessantly and continually beginning. As Yves Bonnefoy puts it, “Sánchez Robayna knows what ‘the new time’ expects of us which Rimbaud foresaw as ‘very severe’.”
The Book, Behind the Dune (El libro, tras la duna), already translated into French, Italian, Czech, German and Arabic, is presented here for the first time in English.
Andrés Sánchez Robayna was born in the Canary Islands in 1952. A poet and an essayist, he has been professor of Spanish Literature at the University of La Laguna in Spain since 1979, as well as teaching at other universities, both in Europe and in America. His poems have been translated into French, English, German, Italian, Arabic, Greek and Dutch.
Louis Bourne (b. 1942), poet, translator and Hispanist, lived in Madrid for 32 years where he still summers, and is now a Professor of Spanish at Georgia College & State University. He has translated poems by Vicente Aleixandre, an anthology, The Crackling Sun (1981), books by María Victoria Atencia, Rafael Bordao, Clara Janés, Justo Jorge Padrón, and Contemporary Poetry from the Canary Islands (1992).
Due out 17th February 2017 from Shearsman.
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