poetry – editorial petròpolis

Emigdi Subirats has translated Gerard Vergés’s poetry collection The Unsustainable Lightness of Verse, offering English-speaking readers access to one of Catalan literature’s most distinctive poetic voices. This is not his first engagement with Vergés’s work: he previously translated The Reddish Shadow of the She-Wolf and Long Play for a Sad Soul, bringing the poet’s deeply cultured, ironic, and emotionally resonant verse to new audiences.

Subirats’s translation style is marked by fidelity to the original tone and imagery, carefully preserving the musicality, intertextual references, and philosophical undertones of Vergés’s writing. His versions are not mere linguistic conversions, but poetic recreations that maintain the richness and subtlety of the original Catalan, respecting both form and feeling.

Gerard Vergés i Príncep
The Unsustainable Lightness of Verse
Col·lecció Nou Món, 31
82 pàgines

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The Unsustainable Lightness of Verse

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Poetry is language in its purest state: a literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm. No ifs ands or buts about it, it had been the most used, prestigious and passionate of literary genres for ages. It was the one brilliantly used by Greek and Roman classics like Homer and Virgil, who were able to give light to the most unforgettable epic stories with the strictest metrics of their period, which are still considered to be among the most outstanding books in literary history.