Edward Hopper

by Ernest Farrés, Lawrence Venuti (Translator)

An arresting sequence of poems based on the life and paintings of Edward Hopper, in an award-winning translation from the Catalan

Genres: Poetry, Art

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I leave the city-hubbub and fall
head first into the cinema-abyss.
The symbol of idleness is an afternoon
in a pitch-dark movie theater."

--from "New York Movie, 1939"

[Francesc Borrull · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than what I expected. Must look at Hopper's paintings while reading the poems to have a better reading experience (images are not included obviously because it would be very expensive to acquire the rights to do so).
The translation is excellent with a couple of misses (i.e. p 89 should have 75, 50, and 25 instead of 120, 80, 40 -mph instead of kmh; p. 37 is not "responsible politicians," but elected). The introduction by Venuti is good, with two misses as well: Farrés is a Catalan poet, not Spanish, and he is not "ideologically charged" because he writes in Catalan. He writes in Catalan because that is his language.

[Amelia Valentino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Farrés crafts a journey through Edward Hopper’s paintings, reflecting its loneliness and brightness of modernism. I was particularly struck by his nature poems of Cape Cod.

[Rowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edward Hopper (Graywolf, 2009) is a complex and striking work of narrative-lyrical poetry, skirting on the epic, that is also one of the more interesting books of poetry to be recently published in English. There are a number of things that make Lawrence Venuti’s translation of Ernest Farrés’s book of poems in the voice of Edward Hopper unusual. One should be obvious from the previous sentence: a tripled persona in which translator speaks for poet who speaks for painter. Another is the scope of the project as a whole; Edward Hopper is envisioned as a complete sequence, gripping in its narrative-lyrical arc, though the poems equally stand alone. The book is also a work of ekphrasis—each of the 51 poems taking its title from a Hopper painting—but radically departs from mere description. The biographical (or pseudo-biographical) engagement with Hopper’s oeuvre sketches its own chronology, re-contextualizing each painting, and shedding new light or shadow on the works.

Full review: http://www.rochester.edu/College/tran...

[Krzysztof · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, and when my sister and I were little, we used to have a recurring dream of floating down our staircase. There were other shared details, which I won't bore you with, but the point is that it was recurring and we didn't find out about the others' dream until some years after we stopped having them.

In the notes section at the end of this book, the translator says that Hopper had a "repeated dream of levitation, sailing downstairs & out thru door."

I'd be curious if anyone else has ever had that recurring dream.