Edward Hopper

The poems in Ernest Farrés's Edward Hopper, each based on a painting by the American artist, are not arranged chronologically, as in a museum retrospective, but biographically, moving from small-town origins to big-city life, from a job search to a career, from bachelorhood to love and companionship, from youth to age. The story belongs to Hopper, yet also to Farrés, and recurrently the ventriloquism slips, revealing a European sensibility and a larger project: Farrés uses the paintings of an American cultural icon to tell a story of modernity.

Praise

"The great American painter of solitude comes back to us brilliantly illuminated and transformed by the contemporary Catalan poet Ernest Farrés, who is cannily—cunningly!—translated by Lawrence Venuti into a sparkling English vernacular. This is a book of unexpected splendors."—Edward Hirsch

 

"The power of Hopper's imagery to provoke poetry is manifest in Ernest Farrés's poems written in Catalan, a once-suppressed language, happily now made accessible in English translation by Lawrence Venuti. These poems remind is of Hopper's fear that representational painting was being suppressed by proponents of abstraction during the 1950s, while they reveal why both a Catalan poet and recent Spanish representational painters have shared in the discovery of Hopper's work."—Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor, The City University of New York, author of Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography

 

"'Hopper and I form one single person,' says the Catalan poet Ernest Farrés of his poems on Edward Hopper's paintings. Joining this company of two, Lawrence Venuti carries Hopper home by making him a stranger. The idiom Venuti has invented is at once American and otherworldly, doubled, like the poems he translates, like the paintings Farrés translated into poems. Not just a brilliant sequence of poems, Edward Hopper is a three-part invention."—James Longenbach

About the Author(s)

Ernest Farrés

Ernest Farrés, an editor at the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia, is the author of three poetry collections. Edward Hopper won the Englantina d'Or of the Jocs Florals, a major Catalan poetry prize.  Lawrence Venuti is a translation theorist as well as a translator. He is the author of The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation.