Rubén Darío. Selected Poems. Translated by Adam Feinstein

The Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío, died more than a century ago (in 1916) but his influence on Spanish-language poetry remains immense. Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo and Gabriel García Márquez, among others, acknowledged their debt. In this special event to commemorate the 153rd anniversary of the poet's birth, Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda’s acclaimed biographer and translator, will read some of his new rhyming translations of Darío’s poetry and, together with Carlos F. Grigsby, the Nicaragua-born poet, writer, scholar and translator, will discuss the specific challenges involved in translating Darío’s work and, above all, his decision to maintain the rhyme in English. The poems will be 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, was first published by Bloomsbury in 2004 and reissued in an updated edition in 2013 (Harold Pinter called it ‘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). Feinstein has given lectures on Neruda, autism and the cinema all over the world. His own poems and his translations (of Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Mario Benedetti and others) have appeared in numerous magazines. 

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. His translations have appeared in magazines such as Latin American Literature Today, Massachusetts Review, among others.

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 the ir translations of Spanish and Latin-American poetry into other la nguages. 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 de legate for that publication. Antonio is the author of two books of poems Los viajes de Dios (The Travels of Goddess) (Diego Marín, 2015) and Goddess Summons The Nation (Amazon, 2018) and has published in Poetry Life and Times.

María Estévez-Serrano develops her career as an actress, poet and playwright between Spain and the United Kingdom. Her tribute to Federico García Lorca, “Verde, Agua y Luna” has been twice awarded with the prizes for Best Theater Production and the Runner-Up for Best Performance by the Latin UK Awards (LUKAS). María combines her artistic work with teaching and also has a degree in Philosophy by the UAM University (Madrid).