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The Mexican Nobel Prize awardee Octavio Paz said of Ramón López Velarde (1888–1921) that ‘his style, at once concentrated and complex, triumphs in what could be called fixated intensity—that moment when our blood throngs, our thinking suspends, and our spirit transfixes.’ Chile’s Pablo Neruda once called López Velarde ‘the essential and supreme poet of our extensive Americas.’
The course “A Poetical Celebration: Ramón López Velarde in English” is a journey through the poetical works of one Mexico’s most representative poets. Amidst the commemorational events for the centenary of the writer’s parting, this course will explore the manners in which López Velarde’s verse has been read in Spanish and rendered into English, both in the 20th and the 21st century.
Students will also have the opportunity to approach, read, and analyze—through the versions of at least three different translators—some of López Velarde’s best-known and best-loved pieces, as well as some of his most intimate lines and texts.
About the speaker
Mario Murgia is a poet, translator, and full professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Among his publications are the books Lines writ in Water. The Influence of Paradise Lost on Byron, Keats and Shelley (UNAM, 2017), Singularly Remote. Essays on Poetries (MadHat Press, 2018), May the World Forgive. An Anthology of Poetry (AliosVentos, 2019), and in translation, John Milton’s Areopagitica (2009), The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (2011), Comus (2012), and Do I know you? The Poetry of Ben Mazer (UNAM, 2019). He has translated into Spanish the work of poets such as Edgar Allan Poe, Adrienne Rich, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Eavan Boland, Alastair Reid, and James Joyce, among many others. Murgia is co-editor, with Angelica Duran, of the volume Global Milton and Visual Art (Lexington Books, 2021). Forthcoming is The Green Leaf of Language. Contemporary Anglo-Irish Poetry, which he has edited for UNAM’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.