If Only for a Moment (I'll Never Be Young Again)

Jaime Gil de Biedma is the most original and influential among the poets known as the '50's Generation in Spain, and is considered the greatest Spanish poet to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. His life and literary career were bracketed almost entirely by the rise and fall of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, notorious for the suppression of literature. Born in 1929, he was six years old when García Lorca was murdered in Granada at the outbreak if the Civil War, and his collected poems, Las personas del verbo, first appeared in 1975, the year Franco died. What is surprising is that Gil de Biedma was a leftist, homosexual poet from the Catalan capitol, Barcelona – all of Franco's favorite things – who not only published books of autobiographical poetry in Spain but was known as a poet of social conscience as well as erotic lyricism. Like other Spanish poets of his time, he chose his words carefully.

In Gil de Biedma, masterfully translated by James Nolan, I read a poetry that survives under pressure. These are poems that yearn for a lost Spain as our speaker longs for his youth. As Nolan attests in his introduction, these poems don't know that Almodóvar will swagger down Calle Amor de Dios in a few years. Poetry outlasts Franco and AIDS. A poet like Gil de Biedma will add to the record of what life was like under oppression. Gil de Biedma fills in what was lost. - Spencer Reece

Jamie Gil de Biedma (Author)
Jaime Gil de Biedma is widely recognized as Spain's finest poet since García Lorca. Born in 1929, his childhood and almost entire adult life were bracketed by the bloody civil war and Franco's fascist state. Yet rooted in Barcelona, he managed to become a cosmopolitan poet, lived as a clandestine leftist and gay man, and published three books of poetry under strict censorship. His poetry is collected in the anthology Las personas del verbo (1975). He died of AIDS in 1990, and since the publication of his diaries, he has become the icon of a passionate literary cult.

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