Rubén Darío. Selected Poems. Translated by Adam Feinstein

The Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío, left an indelible mark in the poetry in Spanish language. Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo and Gabriel García Márquez, among others, acknowledged their debt. Jorge Luis Borges declared: ‘Darío was an innovator in everything: subject matter, vocabulary, metre, the peculiar magic of certain words… We can truly call him the Liberator.' In this event, Hiapnist and writer Adam Feinstein will introduce his new publication: a selection of rhyming translations of Darío’s poetry. Together with Carlos F. Grigsby, the Nicaragua-born poet, writer, scholar and translator, he will discuss the specific challenges involved in translating Darío’s work and, above all, his decision to maintain the rhyme in English. The debate will open with University of Leeds lecturer and poet, Antonio Martínez Arboleda. The poems will also be read in Spanish by the Spanish actress, María Estévez Serrano.

Adam Feinstein is an author, poet, translator, Hispanist, journalist, film critic and autism researcher. His acclaimed biography of the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life (first published by Bloomsbury in 2004; reissued in an updated edition in 2013), was defined by Harold Pinter as "a masterpiece’. Other books include a bilingual collection of his translations, The Unknown Neruda (Arc, 2019), and, most recently, his rhyming English translations from the great Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío, which first came out in Managua in January 2020 and has just been published in a separate UK edition (Shearsman, 2020).

Carlos F. Grigsby in a Nicaraguan-born poet, writer, scholar and translator. He completed his doctorate in the translation of Rubén Darío into English in the University of Oxford, Rediscovering Rubén Darío through Translation. He also published articles on Darío in journals such as Bulletin of Spanish Studies and MLR. For his poetry, he has won the XX international Poetry Prize “Premio Creación Joven Fundación Loewe” in 2007 for the poetry collection Una oscuridad brillando en la claridad que la claridad no logra comprender (Visor Libros, 2008), making him the youngest person to win the award.

Antonio Martínez Arboleda is an educator and cultural activist. He works in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures as a Principal Teaching Fellow in Spanish and is Co-director of the University’s Centre for Research in Digital Education. He has led a variety of digitisation projects and directs the international digital space La Crátera de Ártemis, where university students and academics around the world share their translations of Spanish and Latin-American poetry into other languages. He also runs the inclusive multilingual and multimodal community poetry event Transforming with Poetry. As a translator, he contributes to the Spanish Crátera Revista de Crítica y Poesía Contemporánea with translations from English and he is the UK delegate for that publication.