“‘Hopper and I form one single person,’ says the Catalan poet
Ernest Farrés of his poems on Edward Hopper’s paintings. Joining this company
of two, Lawrence Venuti carries Hopper home by making him stranger. The idiom
Venuti has invented is at once American and otherworldly, doubled, like the
poems he translates, like the paintings Farrés translated into poems. Not just
a brilliant sequence of poems, Edward
Hopper is a three-part invention.”
“The great American painter of solitude comes back to us
brilliantly illuminated and transformed by the contemporary Catalan poet Ernest
Farrés, who is cannily—cunningly!—translated by Lawrence Venuti into a
sparkling English vernacular. This is a book of unexpected splendors.”
—EDWARD HIRSCH
“The second Robert Fagles
Translation Prize is awarded…to Lawrence Venuti’s translation of the
contemporary Catalan poet Ernest Farrés’s Edward
Hopper. This work, a
sequence of fifty poems, each based on a painting by the American realist
artist, is not arranged chronologically according to the dates when the
paintings were completed; instead, the poems sketch a narrative that follows a
poetic subject in transit from small-town origins to big city life, from the
search for a job to a career in art, from bachelorhood to love and
companionship, from youth to age…The poems do not merely rehearse the facts of
the painter’s life or his cantankerous opinions. The ventriloquism slips, as Mr. Venuti says, and the
interrogative force of the writing constantly reminds us of the strange
amalgamation of the Catalan poet and the American icon into a single being.”
—RICHARD HOWARD, Judge, the
National Poetry Series’s Robert Fagles Translation Prize
