Black Tulips
Description
In Black Tulips, Mark Statman gives us the first English translation of the poetry of José María Hinojosa, a well-known poet of Spain’s famed Generation of ’27, which included Lorca, Dalí, Buñuel, Alberti, Aleixandre, and Hernandez. Although his right-wing politics caused him to break with this group during the Spanish Republic, Hinojosa continued to write surrealist poetry until his assassination by Republic sympathizers in 1936. After his death, his work disappeared from Spanish culture until the end of the 20th century. Black Tulips contains a selection of Hinojosa’s entire body of work—from his first book Poema del Campo to his final collection Blood in Freedom. In his introduction, Statman calls Hinojosa “a poet who examines the world to find in the ordinary the mysterious.” In Black Tulips, we find a poet of deep imagination who glimpses another world, both shimmering and violent, beyond the curtain of everyday existence.
Reviews
"Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa, translated by Mark Statman, is a major literary achievement. Mark Statman has unearthed the poetry of a long-forgotten member of the Generation of ’27—that gathering of poets that included Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, and Federico Garcia Lorca, among others. Thanks to Statman, Hinojosa’s work can now be accorded its proper place among that august group. Statman’s acumen as both poet and translator is evident in every page. The results are translations that are faithful to Hinojosa’s originals while standing as fine English poems in their own right." —Pablo Medina
Author Bio
Mark Statman's recent books are the poetry collection, Tourist at a Miracle (Hanging Loose, 2010), and, with Pablo Medina, Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (Grove, 2008). His work has been published in numerous publications and anthologies. He is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts.
