Valente, Jose Angel

Valente, Jose Angel
▪ 2001

      Spanish poet (b. April 25, 1929, Orense, Galicia, Spain—d. July 18, 2000, Geneva, Switz.), was highly regarded for his verse as well as his criticism and translations. One of the principal Spanish poets of the last half of the 20th century, he had a highly individual voice. His verse was both lyrical and philosophical, but in later years it became less direct and more complex. Although he sometimes wrote of life in modern Spain under Francisco Franco, he tended to favour matters such as loneliness and death over overtly political subjects. Valente wrote in Galician as well as Spanish. He earned a degree in Romance languages from the University of Madrid in 1953 and then taught at the University of Oxford, where he gained a master's degree, and at the University of California, Irvine. Living in exile from the 1950s until 1986, he was a translator (1958–80) for the World Health Organization in Geneva and worked (1980–86) for UNESCO in Paris. A modo de esperanza (1955) was the first of his more than 20 volumes of poetry. Among later volumes were Presentación y memorial para un monumento (1970), featuring poems on the individual in modern society, and No amanece el cantor (1992), involving series of opposites such as darkness and light. Valente won many literary prizes, including the National Poetry Prize in 1992, and he was twice awarded the Premio de la Crítica, for Poemas a Lázaro (1960) and for Tres lecciones de tinieblas (1980). Obra poética appeared in 1999. He translated the work of a number of European poets into Spanish, and many of his own poems were translated into other languages.

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▪ Spanish poet and essayist
born April 25, 1929, Orense, Galicia, Spain
died July 18, 2000, Geneva, Switz.

      Spanish lyric poet and essayist who published translations and criticism in addition to more than 20 books of his own verse. The themes of his often philosophical poems are exile, death, and poverty in modern Spain. He is considered by some to be Spain's best postwar poet.

      Valente graduated in 1953 from the University of Madrid and later studied and lectured at the University of Oxford in England. From 1958 to 1980 he worked as a translator for several international organizations headquartered in Geneva.

      Valente's earliest work is characterized by simple verse devoid of artifice and by an objective representation of reality. A modo de esperanza (1955; “In the Manner of Hope”) confronts the problems of death and loss while presenting many scenes from everyday life. La memoria y los signos (1966; “The Memory and the Signs”) deals in part with the Spanish Civil War and contains many biographical and historical sections.

      In his later works Valente began to experiment with more complex and allusive verse. Presentación y memorial para un monumento (1970; “Presentation and Memorial for a Monument”), for example, discusses the dogmatism of modern society and the agony of the individual. In Material memoria (1979; 2nd ed., expanded, 1995) Valente meditates on life and art. The 54 prose poems in No amanece el cantor (1992; “The Singer Does Not Awake”) are abstract and elliptical, playing with the concept of negatives and positives, such as dark and light, absence and presence, silence and speech. Two of his volumes, Poemes de Lázaro (1960; “Poems of Lazarus”) and Tres lecciones de tinieblas (1980; “Three Lessons of Darkness”), won prestigious literary awards in Spain. Valente also wrote two series of essays on a variety of subjects, including the Catholic mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila (Teresa of Ávila, Saint) and the German painter Matthias Grünewald (Grünewald, Matthias). They are collected in Variaciones sobre el pájaro y la red; precedido de la piedra y el centro (1991; “Variations on the Bird and the Net; Preceded by the Stone and the Centre”).

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Universalium. 2010.

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