paper • 190 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-42-7
eISBN: 978-1-961897-43-4
March 2025 • Poetry
Named a Poetry Northwest Spring 2025 Favorite
In his first full-length translation, celebrated poet John Murillo (Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Four Quartets Prize) brings Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels (Sobre los ángeles) to an English-reading audience. Murillo’s foreword introduces Sobre los ángeles as “a monument—albeit a severely neglected monument—of early twentieth-century literature.” Despite having “penned a masterwork of social and psychic malaise as deserving as any of its place in the global canon,” Alberti has disappeared into relative obscurity among readers of English language poetry, and Murillo’s crucial intervention allows the Spanish poet’s voice to once again echo prophetically from this book’s opening poem, “Paradise Lost”: “throughout the centuries, / through the nothingness of the world, / I, without sleep, search for you.” Insofar as the speaker addresses a figure named Shadow, he also seems to imagine us, his future readers, who need these prescient lyrics written in the time leading up to Spain’s civil war and ensuing decades of fascist rule. Bringing his signature gifts to translating from the Spanish, Murillo has given new life to what many consider Alberti’s magnum opus and delivered our marching orders for the resistance the future will require. “It is time you gave me your hand / and scratched into me the little light that catches a hole as it closes / and killed for me this evil word I plan to plunge into the thawing earth.”
Madrigal Without Redress
Because, finally, the sad fires abandoned you
and the slow smoke watched,
closing off the castle, the snow-covered jail,
where the rose forgets its ghost,
my heart, with neither voice nor battalion,
comes solo to the bum-rush
of those lights, mirrors of ash,
bearers of a dead one south of death.
See his chest, risen, in two brooks
of water and blood, toward yours,
already burnt hollow, kindling, facile
and false, flower, my sorrow, without redress.
Concerning the Angels (Sobre los ángeles) by Rafael Alberti was published in 1929, and is one of the most original literary works of that period in Spain. Poet and translator John Murillo brings us back to these poems, a dynamic and stirring collection that marked a sudden and major transformation in theme and structure in Alberti’s work. Every poem is a terrain where a conflict is fought. Every translated poem, an opportunity to encounter tensions that offer illumination. John Murillo’s lyrical translations are exquisite, echoing even the silent cries of the angels, transporting the core of an Andalusian masterpiece into English.
Long considered Spanish Generation of 1927 poet Rafael Alberti’s masterpiece and one of the most haunting and unforgettable extended sequences in modern Spanish poetry, Concerning the Angels returns to English-language readers in an entrancing new translation by poet John Murillo. Capturing Alberti’s rich sensuousness, the profound strangeness of his lyric voice, the sublime contours of this poetic world-between-worlds, and the poet’s depthless sense of loss—of love, of faith, of his former style—Murillo gifts us with a 21st century classic.
The sonic pleasures of Alberti’s poems manifest majestically in these stunning translations from John Murillo. Every image, every “static shadow of the dog” comes to life in Murillo’s English recreations of Alberti’s cadence and mesmerizing intensity of his poems.
Written during what Rafael Alberti later called the “feverish atmosphere” of his own Dark Night of the Soul, Concerning the Angels (Sobre los ángeles) stands as one of the masterpieces of world poetry. With a fierce lyric intensity faceted by both Modernist and Surrealist urgencies, Alberti—at the edge of a breakdown—faces and engages his own interior angels who are themselves, at times, also demonic in their force. John Murillo’s brilliant new translations reveal both the precarity of the speaker and the visionary expanse of this extraordinary collection. It’s truly an occasion to celebrate when a great world poet finds their ideal translator.
Murillo’s take on Alberti’s 1929 Concerning the Angels is captivating in its music and particularities of diction, leaning less colloquial in style than Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno’s translation with which some readers will be familiar. Murillo’s renderings of longing and rage embody a serious lyricism…
…pithy, pleasurable poems from 1929 Spain that feel fresh and generous. In his introduction, Murillo notes that the volume was understood as an artistic pivot, a stylistic shift, and this sense of constant possibility drives in English.