Daybook 1918: Early Fragments, by J.V. Foix and translated by Lawrence Venuti, has been longlisted for PEN America's award for Poetry in Translation. Finalists for all Book Awards, including the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and our Career Achievement Awards, will be announced in January 2020. The winners will be celebrated live at the 2020 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony on March 2 at Town Hall in New York City.
Praise for Daybook 1918: Early Fragments
"Venuti is a sage and lyric guide through Foix’s strangeness... Foix’s poems are probably best read between midnight and dawn—or any similar time when we are most attuned to our shadow selves. Added bonus: a few excellent essays on poetry, consciousness, and art by Foix." —The Millions
“Just as Latin American surrealism is distinct from French surrealism, J. V. Foix’s Catalan surrealism—if that’s what his dazzling wormholes through convention, his “irregular, obscene curves” through narrative must be called—is a genre of its own, a parallel evolution of sleight-of-hand, a distant and overlooked species of literature as winning and marvelous as the platypus. Although in Catalonia he’s a beloved icon, Foix is practically unknown in the United States. The introduction to this fulsome translation by Lawrence Venuti is an art in itself, but the art intensifies when the introduction ends: Foix comes alive in English!” —Forrest Gander, author of Core Samples from the World and Be With
J. V. FOIX (1893–1987) was an influential poet, essayist, journalist, and figure in Catalan letters. He was active in the Catalan nationalist movement and instrumental in introducing the modernist avant-gardes into Catalonia. His poetry is distinguished by an experimentalism that synthesizes medieval literary traditions with modern tendencies like surrealism.
LAWRENCE VENUTI, a professor of English at Temple University, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author, editor, or translator of twenty-five books, including The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, The Translation Studies Reader, and Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters.
