De la simple existencia: Antología poética by Wallace Stevens, and: La roca by Wallace Stevens, and: Poemas tardíos by Wallace Stevens, and: Ideas de orden by Wallace Stevens, and: Las auroras de otoño y otros poemas by Wallace Stevens (review)

In the last few years, Spanish readers have been treated to an unusually rich selection of Wallace Stevens' writings, all made available in bilingual editions. The relatively small number of books that Stevens published during his lifetime turns the five collections of translations listed above into a substantial selection from his works. Not only can the Spanish reader now find translations of a sizable number of canonized poems, from "The Idea of Order at Key West" and "The Man with the Blue Guitar" to "The Auroras of Autumn" and "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," he or she can also enjoy Spanish versions of Stevens' major prose writings, whether they be the essays collected in The Necessary Angel or epigraphs from "Adagia." That a poet's personal collection of aphorisms has been translated may itself be regarded as a meaningful indication of the stature he has achieved in a foreign country.

There are several explanations for the interest Stevens has aroused in Spanish readers and, above all, poets. The most important one, it seems to me, is his defining concern with the relations between poetry and philosophy. Such a concern has been typical of an important strand in Spanish poetry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Characteristically, Andrés Sánchez Robayna, one of the poet-translators under review here, entitled a talk he gave a few years ago about a selection of twentieth-century Spanish poets, "Poesía y pensamiento" [Poetry and Thought]. In Spain, the cross-fertilization of these two spheres has resulted in a poetic lineage that has been most fruitful. Quite a few Spanish poets have looked to British romantic poetry, for example, as a philosophical poetry (see Eugenia Perojo Arronte's contribution to The Reception of S. T. Coleridge in Europe [London: Continuum, 2007]). Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poetry has been regarded among Spanish admirers as a form of secular meditation, with its own reflective pace and tone. Stevens' analogous interest in meditative poetry and substitutions for religion fits this mold particularly well.

One of the first explicit references to the American poet's works appears in a collection of essays by José Ángel Valente (1929-2000) published in 1971 under the title Las palabras de la tribu [The Words of the Tribe]. Early in this book, Valente quotes from the introduction to The Necessary Angel: "One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time" (CPP 639). Valente, who spent four years as a Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University, kept up a sustained friendship with José Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet-editor who collaborated with Stevens' epistolary friend José Rodríguez Feo on the magazine Orígenes. In addition, Valente always acknowledged Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation (1954) as a fundamental source of inspiration. Martz, as we know, also published various essays on Stevens, and it seems plausible that Valente was familiar with at least some of this work as well. With Stevens, Valente may be said to have shared ideas about decreation, the role of the imagination in poetry, the ascendancy of romanticism, and the relations between painting and poetry.

In recent decades, it is Sánchez Robayna who has written most extensively on Stevens. His interest in the American modernist is consistent...