Rimbaud gave the Illuminations away and never asked for it back. Our new critical edition places the poems among the voices around them: Verlaine, Nouveau, original essays and images. Out now as ebook and paperback on Amazon and Apple Books. Continue reading A Book Given Away 🇫🇷✒️🏴
“Gacela del amor con cien años” — the Gacela of Love with a Hundred Years — is one of the most urgently lyrical poems in Federico García Lorca’s Dívan del Tamarit, the Arabic-Andalusian collection he completed in 1934 and never saw published. It is a poem about the absolute persistence of love: a passion so elemental that neither walls, nor distance, nor the weight of a century can contain it. The poem moves with the breathless forward pressure that defines Lorca’s mature gacelas — anaphoric, accumulative, driven by a symbolic logic of blood, water, and unstoppable desire.
This post presents the poem in all three of its languages: the original Spanish, a new English translation, and a new Italian translation, both by Enzo Martinelli for Blue Phoenix Editions. The trilingual facing-page format allows readers to trace Lorca’s imagery across languages — and to see, line by line, the choices every translation entails.
Read the poem — and the translator’s note on the decisions behind it. Continue reading Gacela del amor con cien años, de García Lorca ✒️📃🇪🇸
Of all the images that populate Federico García Lorca’s poetical universe, none is more insistent — or more deceptive — than the moon. It rises over the gacelas of the Dívan del Tamarit and casts its cold light across the Sonnets of Dark Love, and at first encounter it looks like what the lyric tradition has always made of it: beauty, romance, the night sky of an Andalusian garden. But in Lorca’s symbolic lexicon, the moon is first and foremost a sign of death.
As the scholar Rupert C. Allen established in his foundational study The Symbolic World of Federico García Lorca, the moon is the poet’s most frequent symbol — and its range is extraordinary: death, eroticism, fertility, sterility, and cold unattainable beauty, all activated differently depending on the symbolic field surrounding it. Learning to read the moon in Lorca is learning to read Lorca himself.
This post explores how the moon operates across the late collections — and what it costs to look at it. Continue reading The Moon in Lorca’s poetical universe ✒️🇪🇸🏴
لم يتركوني كي أحتضن عظام أخي.لم يسمحوا لي بأن أقترب من الجثة أيضًا.كنت أصرخ، وهم يصرخون:“لا تفعلي ذلك، أرجوكِ لا تنظري!” فأجبَروني على ألّا أنظر،لآخر مرة،لنظرة الوداع. لم يسمحوا لي، خوفًا من هول المنظر.لكنني أخبرتهم:سيكون جميلًا، حتى لو كان أخي بضع عظام. أرجوكم، لا تفعلوا الشيء ذاتهعندما نجد جثمان أخي الآخر.أرجوكم، لا تفعلوا. أعلم أنكم خائفون عليّ،كي لا أصاب بالصدمة.لكني صُدمتُ منذ الثالثة من عمري،حين … Continue reading They did not let me, by Amira Atiya Abu Al-Husain
“Spontaneous Me” is one of Walt Whitman’s most daring and sensual poems, taken from the “Children of Adam” section of Leaves of Grass. A hymn to the instinctive nature of human desire and its connection with the natural world. In this article you will find the original text in English, along with the translations into Italian and Spanish, with a reflection on the bodily and naturalistic language that made Whitman so revolutionary for his time.
“Spontaneous Me” è una delle poesie più audaci e sensuali di Walt Whitman, tratta dalla sezione “Children of Adam” di Leaves of Grass. Un inno alla natura istintiva del desiderio umano e alla sua connessione con il mondo naturale. In questo articolo trovate il testo originale in inglese, insieme alle traduzioni in italiano e spagnolo, con una riflessione sul linguaggio corporeo e naturalistico che rese Whitman così rivoluzionario per il suo tempo. Continue reading Spontaneous me, by Walt Whitman 🌿🖋📖
A kite rising over Gaza becomes a symbol of survival in Amira Atiya Abu Al-Husain’s newest poem. We share her words alongside news of the paperback edition of her memoir, The Diary from Gaza. Continue reading What is a kite compared to a warplane? by Amira Atiya Abu Al-Husain
Ricardo Reis — Fernando Pessoa’s classical, Stoic heteronym — wrote some of modernism’s most austere and formally accomplished meditations on mortality. This commentary examines one of his finest odes: a poem in which a dead woman’s hands become things, her name is forgotten, and only the poem itself survives to preserve a single, anonymous smile.
Continue reading A nada imploram tuas mãos já coisas, por Fernando Pessoa 📃🖋🇵🇹
Poem by Arthur Rimbaud from his poetry collection “Illuminations”, – Veillées – presented in its original version in French and in translation into English, Italian and Spanish, curated by Enzo Martinelli. Continue reading Veillées, de Arthur Rimbaud 💡✒️🇫🇷
Federico García Lorca’s late poetry feels instinctive, even wild — but beneath its sensory surface lies a precise symbolic grammar. In the Diván del Tamarit and the Sonetos del amor oscuro, his two posthumous masterworks, the moon signals death as much as beauty; blood fuses erotic desire with mortal wound; running water means life while standing water means death; and the horse gallops toward the abyss of the duende. These are not decorative images — they are a system, one Lorca spent his entire career perfecting and brought to its fullest expression in the collections he would never see published. This post explores the symbolic world of Lorca’s final poetry, with close readings of key poems and reference to the critical essays in our new bilingual English edition. Learn to read the signs — and Lorca will never read the same way again. Continue reading The poetical universe of Federico García Lorca ✒️🇪🇸🏴
“As Consequent, etc.” is a little-known praise by Walt Whitman to the river as a metaphor for life and poetry itself. In this article you will find the original text in English flanked by Italian and Spanish translations, with a brief comment on the symbolic meaning of water in Whitman’s work and the challenges of making his verse free in other languages. Continue reading As consequent, by Walt Whitman 🌿🖋📖
