Translator's Introduction to Battery — Web Exclusive
By Don Bogen
Born in Madrid in 1955, Julio Martínez Mesanza is among the most prominent of the generation of Spanish poets who came of age after the death of Franco. Between 1983 and 1990 he published four editions of a single, expanding collection, Europa, followed by Las trincheras (The Trenches) in 1996, Entre el muro y el foso (Between the Wall and the Ditch) in 2007, and a volume of selected poems in 2007.
Among the things that led me to translate Martínez Mesanza are his particular focus and approach. He stands in a line of poets who are engaged with history, and has mentioned, among others, Borges, Cavafy, and Wilfred Owen as important predecessors. His interest is less in historical figures and events themselves than in the ethical questions they raise. This leads him to investigate troubled moments from biblical and classical times through the twentieth century, and his angle is sharp and often surprising. Warfare is a recurrent motif—I can’t think of another contemporary poet who has delved as deeply into the complexities of war and its moral ramifications. His poems arising from personal experience, including his time as a conscript in the Spanish army, show the same ethical intelligence.
Spanish critics often refer to Martínez Mesanza as an “epic” poet, not just because of his themes but also because of his consistent use of unrhymed eleven-syllable lines, a meter common in Golden Age literature but fairly unusual in Spanish poetry today. His voice is equally distinctive: his vocabulary is unadorned and modern, and his balanced sentences—some of considerable length—move through the lines with little enjambment, no questions, and no stanza breaks. The overall effect is one of calm exploration of feelings and basic human concerns, reflective but not overly self-conscious—a well-paced music that engages the past and speaks to our own time with clarity and grace.
Capturing the movement and tone of Martínez Mesanza’s poems is the biggest challenge in translating his work. I’ve used blank verse to suggest the literary resonance in the poet’s choice of meter, and worked sentence-by-sentence rather than line-by-line. In vocabulary and phrasing, I’ve aimed for a directness that might allow some of his unique voice and sensibility to come through.
Don Bogen is the author of four books of poetry, most recently An Algebra. His translations have appeared in Boston Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and others.
This introduction is published in conjunction with Counterfeits, the 18th volume of TWO LINES, which includes this introduction, along with translations of over 30 other international writers. To learn more and order your own copy, visit this page.