Bèsties 6. Whitman

11.00€

Jaume C. Pons Alorda translates nineteen “posthumous” poems by Walt Whitman, written for inclusion in his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, but ultimately discarded by himself. It is a lucid, comical, tender, lyrical, incisive and categorical Whitman, one that goes beyond that image of a  loud and radical savage that we have of him. Because Whitman contains an infinite number of Whitmans, and these nineteen fragments constitute a representative sample of them. None of them were published in his lifetime. Jaume Pons translates them with great fidelity, maintaining the original weight that every single word carries in the original texts.

Walt Whitman (Long Island, 1819 – Camden, New Jersey, 1892). Journalist, novelist, chronicler and essayist. Beyond the poetics of his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, and his better-known outspoken personality, there is a lucid, comical, tender, lyrical, incisive and categorical Whitman, born out of his activity as a diarist during the American Civil War (1861-65), the horrors of which he portrayed masterfully.

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Bèsties is a wallpaper collection that combines the poetry and the portraits of some of the most acclaimed authors of universal literature. A selection of excerpts —posthumous, unpublished, forgotten— are presented in a groundbreaking format by the translators, current Catalan poets. The posters escape the parcelling of conventional pagination to project in a single canvas the unity of meaning emanating from the poems. Each wallpaper comes with a separate front page including a foreword by the translator, which contextualizes their selection and situates the author in their context.