Edward Hopper

Farres Ernest

Each poem in Catalan writer Ernest Farres's "Edward Hopper" is based on a painting by the American artist. Creating a narrative that follows a subject from small-town origins to big-city life, from youth to age, the story is Hopper's, yet it also belongs to Farres. The ventriloquist slips, revealing his larger concerns: Farres is using the paintings to tell a story of modernity.

Lawrence Venuti's translations recreate the heterogeneous language of Farres's poetry in an American vernacular that samples Hopper's actual speech and writing. Farres's book becomes in English what it is for Catalan readers: remarkable in ambition, wit, and in its probing interpretations of the visual imagination.

About the author

Catalan poet Ernest Farres was born in Igualada in 1967 and lives in Barcelona. A journalist who works on the cultural supplement of La Vanguardia, he has written three volumes of poems: "Clavar-ne una al mall i l'altra a l'enclusa" (1996), "Mosquits" (1998) and "Edward Hopper" (2006), which won the Englantina d'Or of the Jocs Florals of Barcelona. He has also edited an anthology of contemporary Catalan poetry, 21 poetes del XXI (2001). In Spain Edward Hopper has been adapted to the stage in both Catalan and Spanish. English versions of Farres's poems have recently appeared in "Calque", "The Nation", "PN Review", "Two Lines", "Words without Borders", "World Literature Today", and "Zoland Poetry".

Reviews

"The great American painter of solitude comes back to us brilliantly illuminated and transformed by the contemporary Catalan poet Ernest Farres, who is cannily – cunningly! – translated by Lawrence Venuti into a sparkling English vernacular. This is a book of unexpected splendors" – Edward Hirsch