Poetry Night with Mario Martín Gijón, Eduardo Moga and Terence Dooley

We invite you to meet the poets Mario Martín Gijón and Eduardo Moga and their UK translator Terence Dooley. An evening to discover their latest collections of poems translated into English by Shearman books: Sur(rendering) by Mario Martín Gijón and My Father, by Eduardo Moga.

(Sur)rendering, by Mario Martín Gijón, is a sequence of short passionate lyrics describing a love lost and found. This might sound like nothing new in the history of poetry, but the poet immerses us in his story by a complex process of linguistic recreation: recreation in the sense of re-invention and recreation also as play, or playfulness. Mario Martín Gijón is able to juggle the memory of pleasure with present suffering, joy and pain in a single verse: (pre/es/ab)sence. Ambiguity striving for synchronicity, the language of love becoming as fraught with contradiction as love itself.

My father, by Eduardo Moga, is a reconstruction of a mirror broken into a hundred shards and assembles a portrait of his father, thirty years after his death, from tiny sharp fragments of memory. This is no idealized patriarch but an ordinary man who has lived almost his whole life in the grey, grey hard scrabble years of the Franco dictatorship when it was ‘as if everybody’s feet smelt’. He is seen with forensic clarity through now a child’s, now an adult’s eyes and across the gulf that education, relative prosperity and happier times inevitably create. He is sometimes absurd in his opinions and little vanities, sometimes off-putting in his personal habits, angry, lost, pitiable, but often kind and wanting to pass on his erratic wisdom. Most of all, and this is Moga’s great achievement, he is a real living person.