Selected Poems

Michael Smith (1942-2014) was a poet who gave a lifetime of service to the art of poetry both in English and Spanish. He has been described as a classical modernist, a poet of modern life. Born in Dublin, Michael was the founder of New Writers' Press in 1967 and was responsible for the publication of over 100 books and magazines. He was keen to promote the modernist tradition in Irish poetry, publishing the work of Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, Anthony Cronin and Michael Hartnett, among others. He was founder and editor of the influential literary magazine The Lace Curtain.From 1984 to 1989 he was a member of the Irish Arts Council and was also a member of Aosdána. He translated into English and published some of the most difficult and exhilarating poets in Spanish, including Lorca, Neruda, Miguel Hernández and the two great Spanish masters of the baroque, Quevedo and Góngora. He has also translated Gerardo Diego, José Hierro and selections of the poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Luis Cernuda, among others. For Shearsman he co-translated in three volumes the poetry of the great 20th century Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, Trilce, Complete Later Poems 1923-1938 and The Black Heralds, with the Peruvian scholar, Valentino Gianuzzi, thus bringing all of Vallejo's poetry into English - these volumes have since been republished by Shearsman in a single volume of almost 800 pages, now considered the definitive version in English. His translations (with Luis Ingelmo) of the Selected Poems of Rosalía de Castro and of the Collected Poems / Rimas of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer were also published by Shearsman. He also translated the Complete Poems of Claudio Rodríguez and (with Beatriz White) a Selected Poems of Juan Antonio Villacañas (Shearsman). His translation of Miguel Hernández's Cancionero y romancero de ausencia was punished in the United States in 2008 by Parlor Press. He has also co-translated a Selected Poems of Elsa Cross and Arcana by Verónica Volkow, among others.In 2001, He was the first Irish recipient of the European Academy Medal for distinguished work in the translation of poetry in Spanish, awarded by the European Academy of Poetry. He was the first Writer-in-Residence at University College Dublin. His last books were Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2009) and Prayers for the Dead and other poems (Shearsman, 2014).Four of his translations of poems by Rosalía de Castro were published in the Norton Anthology of World Literature in 2013. He contributed a number of translations to The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry edited by Mark Weiss (University of California Press, 2009). In 2012 Shearsman published a new version of his translation, with Luis Ingelmo, of Cantes Flamencos / Flamenco Songs.Michael Smith's own poetry has been translated into Spanish, Polish, French and German, and has appeared in numerous magazines, both in Ireland and abroad, as well as in many important anthologies of contemporary Irish poetry, including The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Derek Mahon and Peter Fallon, and Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Anthony Bradley (University of California Press, 1980, 1988). He also edited three issues of Poetry Ireland Review. For many years he was a regular literary reviewer and features writer for The Irish Times.

Rosalía de Castro, née María Rosalía Rita, was born in 1837, the illegitimate daughter of a priest and a woman from an established bourgeois family, near Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. So far as is known, her father had no contact with Rosalía after her birth. Her illegitimacy waqs to play a considerable role in the development of Rosalía's character. In the Spain of her time, not only was it a great disgrace to be illegitimate, but worse still was to be known as a 'sacrilegious' child, i.e. the offspring of a cleric.Her first small collection of poems, La flor (The Flower), was published in Madrid in 1857 and received a warm review from Miguel Murguía, a journalist whom she had already met in Santiago. Her relationship with Murguía resulted in their marriage in 1858. For the next few years Rosalía and her husband lived in various places, including Santiago, Madrid, Lestrove, A Coruña. The marriage produced six children, one of whom was stillborn while another died after a year. A second book in Spanish was published in Vigo in 1863, A mi madre (To My Mother). Rosalía's first poem in Galician was published in 1861, and in 1863, her collection Cantares gallegos (Galician Songs) appeared, representing a major contribution to the revival of Galician literature after centuries of non-existence, indeed since the Middle Ages. Cantares gallegos went into a second, expanded edition in 1872, and was followed by another Galician volume Follas novos (New Leaves) in 1880 and, finally, a last Spanish volume, En las orillas del Sar (On the Banks of the Sar) in 1884. Rosalía died in 1885, and her manuscripts were destroyed by her eldest daughter, on the author's instructions.Her work was consistently under-rated in her lifetime, at least in Castilian circles, and it is fair to say that she suffered because she was a woman poet, first and foremost, but also because she was 'provincial' and because she wrote much of her work in Galician. In the 20th century her work was reappraised, by García Lorca and Cernuda, among others, and she is now recognised as a major writer in both languages.