My Father
Mi padre
Published on 7. May 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
116 pages
978-1-84861-757-5 (ISBN)
Description
Like a glazier reconstructing a mirror broken into a hundred shards, Eduardo Moga assembles a portrait of his father, thirty years after his death, from tiny sharp fragments of memory. This is no idealized patriarch but an ordinary man who has lived almost his whole life in the grey, grey hardscrabble years of the Franco dictatorship when it was 'as if everybody's feet smelt'. He is seen with a forensic clarity through now a child's, now an adult's eyes and across the gulf that education, relative prosperity and happier times inevitably create. He is sometimes absurd in his opinions and little vanities, sometimes off-putting in his personal habits, angry, lost, pitiable, but often kind and wanting to pass on his erratic wisdom. Most of all, and this is Moga's great achievement, he is a real living person.
Moga writes with lyrical depth about fathers who bequeath the best of themselves to their sons and sow only distance, and about sons who cannot forgive their fathers' vulgarity and cannot forgive their own estrangement and lack of sympathy.
Jose Angel Cilleruelo, El Balcon de Enfrente
In this splendid book Eduardo Moga dissects not just the story of a family but the story of Spain.
Francisco H. Gonzalez, Devaneos
Moga writes with lyrical depth about fathers who bequeath the best of themselves to their sons and sow only distance, and about sons who cannot forgive their fathers' vulgarity and cannot forgive their own estrangement and lack of sympathy.
Jose Angel Cilleruelo, El Balcon de Enfrente
In this splendid book Eduardo Moga dissects not just the story of a family but the story of Spain.
Francisco H. Gonzalez, Devaneos
More details
Language
English
Spanish
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
157 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-757-5 (9781848617575)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Eduardo Moga holds a Law Degree and a PhD in Spanish Philology from the University of Barcelona. He has published 18 poetry books, the main ones being La luz oida (1996), Las horas y los labios (2003), Cuerpo sin mi (2007), Bajo la piel, los dias (2010), Insumision (2013), El corazon, la nada (Antologia poetica 1994-2014) (2014), Muerte y amapolas en Alexandra Avenue (2017), and Mi padre (2019). His poetry has been translated into English (Selected Poems, Shearsman Books, 2017), Portuguese, French, Catalan, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian and Albanian. He has translated Ramon Llull, Frank O'Hara, Evariste Parny, Charles Bukowski, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Rimbaud, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Richard Aldington, Tess Gallagher and Evan S. Connell, among other authors. He currently writes as a literary critic for Letras Libres, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Turia and Quimera, among other cultural media. He is responsible for the anthologies Los versos satiricos. Antologia de poesia satirica universal (2001), Poesia pasion. Doce jovenes poetas espanoles (2004), Medio siglo de oro. Antologia de la poesia contemporanea en catalan (2014), Yo soy el Poema de la Tierra (2019), and Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark. Spanish Poets in London (Shearsman Books, 2019). He has also published travel books, such as La pasion de escribil (2013) and El mundo es ancho y diverso (2018); two selections of posts from his blog Coronicas de Ingalaterra (2015 y 2016), where he gathers his impressions of the two year and a half years that he lived in London and, in general, of British society; and several volumes of diaries and essay, the most recent being, among the former, Expon, que algo queda (2021) and, among the latter, El oro de la sintaxis (2020). He has been director of the Editora Regional de Extremadura and coordinator of the Reading Promotion Plan of Extremadura. He maintains the blogs Coronicas de Ingalaterra and Coronicas de Espania.
Terence Dooley has edited an anthology of contemporary Spanish women poets for Shearsman Books, and has also translated an anthology of exiled Spanish poets (Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark: Spanish Poets in London, 1811-2018, edited by Eduardo Moga). Other translations include The Year of the Crab by Mariano Peyrou, a Selected Poems by Eduardo Moga, and Sur(rendering) by Mario Martin Gijon.
Terence Dooley has edited an anthology of contemporary Spanish women poets for Shearsman Books, and has also translated an anthology of exiled Spanish poets (Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark: Spanish Poets in London, 1811-2018, edited by Eduardo Moga). Other translations include The Year of the Crab by Mariano Peyrou, a Selected Poems by Eduardo Moga, and Sur(rendering) by Mario Martin Gijon.