Francisco de Quevedo – författare

Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), one of the greatest poets of the Spanish Golden Age, was the master of the baroque style known as “conceptismo,” a complex form of expression fueled by elaborate conceits and constant wordplay as well as ethical and philosophical concerns. Although scattered translations of his works have appeared in English, there is currently no comprehensive collection available that samples each of the genres in which Quevedo excelled—metaphysical and moral poetry, grave elegies and moving epitaphs, amorous sonnets and melancholic psalms, playful romances and profane burlesques.

            In this book, Christopher Johnson gathers together a generous selection of forty-six poems—in bilingual Spanish-English format on facing pages—that highlights the range of Quevedo’s technical expertise and themes. Johnson’s ingenious solutions to rendering the difficult seventeenth-century Spanish into poetic English will be invaluable to students and scholars of European history, literature, and translation, as well as poetry lovers wishing to reacquaint themselves with an old master.

Poems to Lisi is presented here as an undergraduate student text with parallel-text English verse translations

This edition of Quevedo’s Poems to Lisi is a successor to the same editor’s original text in Exeter Hispanic Texts, which only contained the Spanish text of the poems (published in 1988). Rather than reprint that edition, the editor has chosen to make the text more widely available by setting his own English verse translations alongside the Spanish originals. It is intended to provide undergraduates in Hispanic Studies with an accessible edition of a key work of the Spanish Golden Age. The translations are close enough to the originals to be of value to those who have an adequate knowledge of Spanish, while the rendering of the poems into English verse (mainly blank verse sonnets) will enable those lacking such a knowledge to read them as poems in their own right.