Burn the Losses
By Antonio Gamoneda

Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez

ISBN: 978-0-900575-24-2 | 88 pages | Price: $18 | Release Date: 4/15/2025

“The light boils beneath my eyelids.”

Shaped by a childhood during the Spanish Civil War and a youth under the censorious Franco dictatorship, Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry chronicles both memory and oblivion with an intensity and strangeness that pushes back against all oppressive forces that seek to flatten and reduce our experiences, our language. Burn the Losses oscillates between purity and filth, hope and darkness, the past and a vibrating lyrical present, refusing simple answers. Instead, Gamoneda enlists the reader in Poetry’s deathless cause: “burn in me the meanings.” “Close my eyes / and burn the limits.”

Praise for Antonio Gamoneda

“Gamoneda’s evocative sensual palette—the scent, feel, taste, and sound of conflicted experience, a lurching between the repellent and the irresistible—is virtually without comparison.”


– Forrest Gander



“The greatest living poet in the Spanish language.”

– Raúl Zurita

About the Author

Antonio Gamoneda was born in Oviedo, Asturias, Spain in 1931. He grew up in León in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, witnessing firsthand the repression brought about by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in power from 1939 to 1975. Gamoneda left school definitively at 14, took a job as a messenger boy at a bank, and continued to work there in different capacities over the next 24 years. He was fiercely opposed to the Franco dictatorship and deeply involved in the resistance movement. While his first book was published in 1960, his next would only come out in 1977, after Franco’s death. It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that his work began to gather widespread attention, winning two prominent awards, including the National Poetry Prize. In 2006, he earned the two highest honors a poet can receive in the Spanish-speaking world, the Reina Sofía Poetry Prize and the Cervantes Prize. He is one of the few writers to obtain both in the same year. Despite such accolades, Gamoneda is not a poet of the establishment. He is self-taught, working-class, insurgent; a truly extraordinary voice in post-Civil War Spain. His work is defiant: hermetic, elliptical, fragmented; words have no fixed meaning; readers must accept being co-creators. Accordingly, it offers an alternative to the so-called “poetry of experience,” the prevailing poetic trend in his country, which places great value on expressing “ordinary” experiences and is overly preoccupied with the common reader’s “enjoyment” of a text. 2003’s Burn the Losses (Arden la pérdidas) serves as an outstanding example of Gamoneda’s poetics.

Translators

Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of poetry and an essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated over thirty books of some of the most respected voices from the region into English. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of the University of Wisconsin’s inaugural Poetry in Translation Prize, two NEA Translation Grants, and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is an editor of the transnational and translational press, Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba. www.katherinemhedeen.com

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over one hundred collections of poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Spanish-speaking region. His selected poems have been translated into a dozen languages and he has read his poetry in more than fifty countries. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is Professor Emeritus of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba. www.victorrodrigueznunez.com