Jordi Doce, an editorial fad in Germany, Italy and the UK

The international projection of the Asturian poet Jordi Duce (Gijón, 1967) grows with time. The author, an already famous voice in the English-speaking world as well as for his work as a translator of great writers (Auden, Eliot, Hughes, Yeats), has just seen his latest book, Master of Distances published in the UK at the prestigious Shearsman Books, founded in Bristol.

This new translation of Twelve’s work combined, in the first quarter of the year, with two translations, into Italian and German, of one of his most acclaimed collections of poetry, We Were Not There, which in 2016 earned him the Melendez Valdés Poetry Prize.

These verses now see the light of day as “Noi non c’eravamo” within the poetry department of Passigli, a Florentine publishing house that has been publishing the best contemporary foreign poetry for Italian audiences for three and a half decades. In the book’s introduction, Pietro Taravachi, who has collaborated on twelve other volumes, describes the collection of poems as “an analysis of a trajectory that tends to emphasize the impossibility of knowing the mystery of reality”. Translator Stefano Bradell ends the analysis in an epilogue where he defines the Twelve’s poetic self as “traveling in an imaginary and sleepy state through the world and language”.

That same title, We Were Not There, has just seen the light of day in a bilingual German-Spanish edition, Were warren nicht da, published in Senior and the work of André Otto, associated with the European Network of Translators project Castrillo de los Polvazares.

The latest Twelve International Publishing is increasing its presence among English readers, who have already been able to read We Were Not There (Shearsman, 2019) and choose Nothing Is Lost (New Publisher, 2021). Now Shearsman presents again “Maestro de distancias” and “Master of Distances,” his latest collection of poems, which has already won critical acclaim as one of the best poems of the year. This was also highlighted by the English publisher who presents Twelve Verses in Terence Dooley’s translation as “a radical experiment in verse and a new point of departure for this excellent lyricist”.