5 - José Ángel Valente's Lectura de Paul Celan: Translation and the Heideggerian Tradition in Spain

Summary

Escribir es como la segregación de las resinas; no es acto, sino lenta formación natural. Musgo, humedad, arcillas, limo, fenómenos del fondo, y no del sueño o de los sueños, sino de los barros oscuros donde las figuras de los sueños fermentan. Escribir no es hacer, sino aposentarse, estar.

(Valente, Material memoria 115)

Writing is like the secretion of resins; it is not an act, but a slow natural formation. Moss, humidity, clays, mire, phenomena of the depths, and not of sleep or of dreams, but of the dark soils where the figure of dreams ferment. To write is not to act, but to settle, to be.)

The career of José Ángel Valente (1929–2000) took shape slowly and organically over the course of several decades. As he himself suggests in this prose-poem from Mandorla, his writing is an unhurried process of development analogous to the formation of natural substances. Ultimately, the process by which his work assumed its definitive identity, especially in the final two decades of his life, was both prolonged and coherent, yielding a poetic work of enormous seriousness and depth.

Valente emerged in the 1950s as one of several poets subsequently included by literary historians in the so-called “Generation of the 1950s.” However, in the 1980s, during Spain's transition to democracy, he increasingly distanced himself from his generational contemporaries. At the time of his death on July 18, 2000, he was identified primarily as the standard-bearer of a belated although still very powerful “High Modernist” tradition in Spanish poetry.