BOOK OF THE COLD is the long-overdue English translation of legendary Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda's 1992 long poem--a surreal, folkloric, modernist masterpiece between poetry and prose.

When a younger generation of Spanish poets began to awaken and stretch their creative limbs at the dawn of a post-Franco era, what they found, intensified by decades of resistance and years of silence, was the beacon of Antonio Gamoneda's mature poetry. His evocative sensual palette--the scent, feel, taste, and sound of conflicted experience, a lurching between the repellent and the irresistible--is virtually without comparison. But the real miracle of his work is how he combines that flashy richness with such syntactical concision, and with a folkloric strangeness peculiar to his work alone. The extraordinary translation by Katherine Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez maintains the compression of the Spanish by often allowing the agency carried by a Spanish verb to be absorbed completely into the English verb. So, for example, 'Fing 'a un rostro' becomes 'Faked a face.' And so in English, as in Spanish, the verb, not the subject, controls the sentence-- Forrest Gander

Antonio Gamoneda's BOOK OF THE COLD, a long poem in the modernist tradition, is an undisputed masterpiece by Spain's greatest living poet. In this sensitive and alert translation, Hedeen and Núñez have captured the epic sweep of Gamoneda's distinctive cadences, halfway between prose and verse. This translation, long overdue, will reveal the full extent of Gamoneda's genius to English-speaking readers.--Jonathan Mayhew

Poetry. Translation.