Reading Room

Celia in the Revolution and Finding Duende on the Shortlist for the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award 2024

The Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award (SUFTA) is offered by the American Literary Translators Association in conjunction with the Spain-USA Foundation. Swan Isle Press is grateful that two (yes, 2!) of our editions are among the inspiring translations.
Our books on the shortlist are:
Celia in the Revolution

Celia in the Revolution
By Elena Fortún
Translated from Spanish by Michael Ugarte

and

Finding Duende

Finding Duende

By Federico García Lorca
Translated from Spanish by Christopher Maurer

Other books on the shortlist are:

Open Heart
By Elvira Lindo
Translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West
Other Press

Stay This Day and Night with Me
By Belén Gopegui
Translated from Spanish by Mark Schafer
City Lights Books

Un Amor
By Sara Mesa
Translated from Spanish by Katie Whittemore
Open Letter Books | Peirene Press

To read what the judges said about each of the shortlist books, you may click here.

Thank you to the Spain-USA Foundation, the American Literary Translators Association, and the judges for the honor of being included among these fine books on the shortlist for the 2024 award.

Finding Duende on the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize 2024 Longlist

Delighted to see the wonderful news that Finding Duende, our bilingual edition, is on the longlist for The Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize 2024. It’s a wonderful and remarkable list of books in translation, inspiring authors, classic and contemporary, and inspiring, passionate, dedicated translators. Best wishes to everyone on the list.

Longlist candidate for
The Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize 2024

Swan Isle Press
Published January 2024

The Azure Cloister Has Arrived!

We’re delighted to announce today that, at long last, THE AZURE CLOISTER has arrived at The University of Chicago Press Distribution Center. Now is a great time to pre-order — it won’t be long until the order is fulfilled. You can order directly from The University of Chicago Press, from Amazon, IndieBound, and other booksellers. As always, we encourage shopping local and frequenting your community library, too.

THE AZURE CLOISTER is a truly remarkable and inspiring volume of poetry by the distinguished Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli, exquisitely and sensitively translated by the late Professor Karl Maurer (1948-2015), and edited posthumously by his brother Professor Christopher Maurer (Boston University). This is the first major English translation of Carlos Germán Belli’s work.

Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize for Literature, says about these poems: “I began reading Belli when he published his first poems, back in the fifties, in a magazine called Mercurio Peruano, and I needed only to read those half dozen texts to feel that this was a new voice, of powerful lyrical worth and great imaginative audacity, capable — as only great poets are — of transforming ugliness into beauty, sadness into stimulation, and turning to gold — that is to poetry — whatever he touches. All that Carlos Germán Belli has written since then has only confirmed and enriched his extraordinary gift of poetry.”

THE AZURE CLOISTER is published in a bilingual edition. Learn more about Carlos Germán Belli from The Poetry Foundation.


Memories of Jewish Chile

Marjorie Agosín is speaking tonight (August 19, 2021) at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. This will be an exploration of Jewish life in Chile. But you don’t have to be in Maryland to enjoy it — the program will stream live on Facebook. More information can be found on the Jewish Museum of Maryland website.

Swan Isle Press has published two of Marjorie Agosín’s books, The Light of Desire | La Luz Del Deseo and The White Islands | Las Islas Blancas.

#OTD…Federico García Lorca

“It is thought that García Lorca was shot and killed by Nationalist militia on 19 August 1936. The author Ian Gibson in his book, The Assassination of García Lorca, argues that he was shot with three others (Joaquín Arcollas Cabezas, Francisco Galadí Melgar and Dióscoro Galindo González) at a place known as the Fuente Grande (‘Great Spring’) which is on the road between Víznar and Alfacar.”

“In my ‘Saint Sebastian’ I remember you,” Salvador Dali replied to Garcia Lorca, referring to the essay on aesthetics that Dali had just written, “. . . and sometimes I think he is you. Let’s see whether Saint Sebastian turns out to be you.’”

Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca.

Edited, Translated, Annotated, & Prologue by Christopher Maurer (Boston University) 24 color plates.

This exchange is but a glimpse into the complex relationship between two renowned and highly influential twentieth-century artists. Written between 1925 and 1936, the letters and lectures bring to life a passionate friendship marked by a thoughtful dialogue on aesthetics and the constant interaction between poetry and painting. From their student days in Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes, where the two waged war against cultural “putrefaction” and mocked the sacred cows of Spanish art, Dali and Garcia Lorca exchanged thoughts on the act of creation, modernity, and the meaning of their art. The volume chronicles how in their poetic skirmishes they sharpened and shaped each other’s work—Garcia Lorca defending his verses of absence and elegy and his love of tradition while Dali argued for his theories of “Clarity” and “Holy Objectivity” and the unsettling logic of Surrealism. Christopher Maurer’s masterful prologue and selection of letters, texts, and images (many generously provided and with the support of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí and Fundación Federico García Lorca), offer compelling and intimate insights into the lives and work of two iconic artists. The two men had a “tragic, passionate relationship,” Dali once wrote—a friendship pierced by the arrows of Saint Sebastian.

Learn more.