Eduardo Espina

Eduardo Espina (Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis) has published the following books of poetry: Valores Personales (Buenos Aires: La máquina de escribir, 1982), La caza nupcial (Buenos Aires: Ultimo Reino, 1993; Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana: 1997, 2a. edición), El oro y la liviandad del brillo (México DF: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1994), Coto de casa (Xalapa: Graffiti, 1995), Lee un poco más despacio (Nueva York: Urbis, 1999), Mínimo de mundo visible (Guadalajara: filodecaballos, 2003), and El cutis patrio (México DF: Aldus, 2006; Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2009, 2a. edición). 

He is also the author of the books of essays El disfraz de la modernidad (México DF: Universidad del Estado de México, 1992), Las ruinas de lo imaginario (Montevideo: Graffiti, 1996), and La condición Milli Vanilli. Ensayos de dos siglos, and Historia Universal del Uruguay, both published by Editorial Planeta in 2003 and 2008, respectively. Julio Herrera y Reissig. Prohibida la entrada a los uruguayos, also from Editorial Planeta, is just out.

He has won the Premio Nacional de Ensayo of Uruguay twice (1996 and 2000) and the Premio Municipal de Poesía, Montevideo, (1998). In 2007 he was awarded the Latino Literary Award for El cutis patrio for “the best publication in the Spanish language in 2006."  Spanish linguist Enrique Mallen has published the book Con/figuración sintáctica: poesía del deslenguaje (Santiago de Chile: Red Internacional del Libro, 2002), a comprehensive study of Espina’s poetry, as well as Poesía del lenguaje: de T.S. Eliot a Eduardo Espina (Mexico City: Aldus, 2008).

Espina’s poems have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Albanian, German, and Croatian. He is included in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and in more than thirty anthologies of Latin American poetry, Medusario: Muestra De Poesia Latinoamericana, published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico City, being among them. Doctoral theses have been written about his poetic works, and extensive academic articles have been published in prestigious academic journals such as Revista Iberoamericana and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Espina is co-editor of S/N: NewWorldPoetics.

Artist’s Statement

THE GREAT AMERICAN PAST

Based on the example of the letter written by Flaubert to his friend Louis Bouilhet—in which he claimed that everything seems to have been written, but as nobody pays attention, it is necessary to write everything again—during my Guggenheim Fellowship term I am writing poems in Spanish about what I consider to be the greatest and most influential poems of North America. The selected poems upon which my own poems will be based will include "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," and "The Snow Man."  Based on my interpretation and critical literary study of the poems, my poems will reform and update the canonical poems’ thematic and formal components. This project, therefore, is a cross between creation and criticism, making the new poems a perfect reading of the referents.