Louis Bourne lived 32 years in Madrid and now teaches Spanish at
Georgia College & State University. Apart from his work on the divine in
RubŽn Dar’o's poetry, Fuerza invisible (1999), his books of translation include The
Crackling Sun
(1981), Vicente Aleixandre; Selected Poems (1987), Mar’a Victoria Atencia; On the
Cutting Edge: Selected Poems (1988) and Memory of the Fire: Selected Poems 1989-2000 (2004), Justo Jorge Padr—n;
Contemporary Poetry from the Canary Islands (1992) edited by S. de la Nuez; The Book of
Interferences
(1995), Rafael Bordao; and The Forest's Secrets (2002), Clara JanŽs. Winner
of the William Arrowsmith Translation Award (2001) and member of the Spanish
Royal Academy of Doctors, he has published three books of poetry in Spanish,
MŽdula de la llama ("Marrow of the Flame," 1981), Lienzos en lo humano ("Canvases in
Humankind," 1986) and R‡fagas de un signo ("Gusts from a
Sign," 1997) and a number of poems in English magazines.
Bourne writes that he met
Claudio Rodr’guez back in 1969 and over the years translated his first four books and consulted him about his
words on numerous occasions. Rodr’guez is considered one of the major figures
of the 1950s and won the following awards:Adonais (1953), Nacional de Poes’a (1983), Reina Sof’a de Poes’a (1993), Pr’ncipe de Asturias (1993). Born in Zamora, he
taught at the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge (1958-1964), and then
for a number of years at NYU in Madrid. He belonged to the Spanish Academy. A
great admirer of Spanish Renaissance poetry, his poems retain echoes of texts
by Saint John of the Cross and Fray Luis de Le—n, but while he used the
language of Christian poets, he wished to maintain a spiritual position that
owes more to a neo-Platonist like Plotinus than to traditional Christianity. He
insisted on Bourne creating the word ãofferanceä to distinguish his sense of
ãentregaä from the traditional religious connotation of ãoffering.ä
Beginning
in 1972, Bourne published translations of Claudioâs poems in a variety of
magazines in the US and England, Granite, International Poetry Review, New Directions 26, Stand, Sunk Island Review. Here are concrete
references to some of Bourne's translations: