Join us for a reading in Spanish and English with renowned poet Fernando Valverde, author of The Insistence of Harm. Professor Allen Josephs will be reading Fernando Valverde’s poems in translation. This event will be free and open to the public.
The Insistence of Harm is a series of poignant lyric poems that takes readers from India to the Balkans to Spain and to Latin America, exploring the nature of “harm” in its various guises—war, disease, heartbreak, suicide. The poems grapple with both the reality of loss and the distance that language imposes on it. The English translations by Allen Josephs and Laura Juliet Wood effectively capture both tone and content while attending to subtle nuances of the original Spanish, bringing a new and important voice to students of Spanish and poetry readers alike.
"Valverde has been widely published and widely praised. This bilingual edition of an award-winning collection brings Valverde’s brilliance into English for the first time, and the poems substantiate his reputation. . . . A long-awaited and enlightening addition to contemporary Spanish-language poetry in translation."
—Booklist
Fernando Valverde (Granada, Spain 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM, and the Sorbonne).
His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. He has received some of the most significant awards for poetry in Spanish, among them the Federico García Lorca, the Emilio Alarcos del Principado de Asturias, and the Antonio Machado. His last book, The Insistence of Harm, has been the most-sold book of poetry in Spain for months and has received the Book of the Year award from the Latino American Writers Institute of the City University of New York. He was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2014 for his collaboration in a work of fusion between poetry and flamenco.
For ten years he has worked as a journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País. He has been, for more than a decade, the director of the International Festival of Poetry in Granada, one of the most important literary events in Europe, that has received more than 300 authors, including several Nobel Prize laureates. He has taught Poetry at the University of North Georgia, and at Emory University, in Atlanta, and he is now teaching Poetry and Literature in Spanish at the University of Virginia.
A world-renowned Hemingway scholar and past president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society, professor Allen Josephs was also president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2008. He has written ten books, including On Hemingway and Spain: Essays & Reviews 1979–2013 and White Wall of Spain: The Mysteries of Andalusian Culture, four critical editions of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, and numerous articles published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and other scholarly publications.
Josephs received the George B. Smith Arts and Letters Award by the National Association of Taurine Clubs for his book Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida and was conferred an honorary membership in the Taurine Bibliophiles of America for his outstanding contributions to taurine scholarship. In recognition of his distinguished record of scholarly and creative activities, Josephs was named UWF’s Faculty Distinguished Research and Creative Activities Scholar in 2007 and 1981.
After writing about Hemingway and Spanish culture for more than forty years, Josephs has turned his attention to Pulitzer-Prize winning American novelist Cormac McCarthy, whom Josephs considers one of the greatest living novelists. Currently, he is also translating the work of Spanish poet Fernando Valverde.