A selective reader: the translations of J. M. Caballero Bonald.

Abstract

J. M. Caballero Bonald is famous mainly for being a poet, a novel and memory writer, although his intellectual work goes beyond any label. In fact, this article shows that his translation work is as important as any other literary creations in his overall production, likewise other authors of his generation such as Jaime Gil de Biedma or José Ángel Valente, and how the quality and rigor of his word matches all the different aspects of his written work. Nevertheless, he has been an occasional translator, mostly for economical reasons, but also for his particular pleasure and curiosity as a reader, to carefully and personally select texts belonging to the avant-garde of foreign literatures and discover special ones which had not yet received the attention they deserved from critics or readers. An example is Poesía rumana contemporánea. Antología bilingüe (Romanian Contemporary Poetry. Bilingual anthology) —translated together with Darie Novãceanu—, which brought to Spain the most important voices of a language, not so far away today, and has been for decades the only reference for the Spanish reader who wanted to find out about this culture.