Diego Valverde Villena

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Diego Valverde Villena

Diego Valverde Villena, born on April 6, 1967, is a poet, essayist and polyglot who holds triple-citizenship. [1] He is Peruvian by birth to Spanish and Bolivian parents.

Contents

Life

Villena was born on April 6, 1967, in Lima, Peru. In 1971, when he was four, his family left Peru for Spain. Like numerous other writers with a Catholic background, he received a Jesuit education, at San Jose (St Joseph), in Valladolid. From 1985 to 1991 he earned three BLitts (in Spanish, English and German letters) at the University of Valladolid. During this time he also attended courses on language and literature at the University of Salamanca (in Scandinavian languages), University of Edinburgh (in Modernism), University College Dublin (in Irish literature and culture) and at the University of Wroclaw (in Polish language and literature). Afterwards he undertook doctoral studies in Medieval English Literature at the University of Oxford, the University of Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen, the University of Chicago and the Complutense University of Madrid, where he earned a MLitt in English Literature.

Valverde Villena worked as a lecturer in several universities, mainly at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia, where he taught Medieval Lyric, Baroque Lyric and Poetry between 1996-1998 and after 2010. From 2002 to 2004 he worked in the staff of the Secretary of State for Culture in Spain. He currently resides in Bolivia, but travels frequently to Spain.

He has translated into Spanish a wide assortment of literary works, by authors which include Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Mikolaj Sep Szarzynski, Paul Éluard, Joachim du Bellay, Valery Larbaud, Nuno Júdice, Jorge Sousa Braga, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Paul Celan.

Style

According to the poet Julio Martínez Mesanza, Valverde Villena's intricately allusive poetry comes from "a perfect mixture of life and culture". [2] His cultural allusions serve as proper devices to show the poet's deepest feelings in a way which resembles the conceit used by the Metaphysical poets. Martínez Mesanza points to John Donne and Ausias March as major influences on Valverde Villena.

Valverde Villena's short poems have been called "flash poems" or "spark poems" by some critics, because they concentrate so many ideas into a few lines of verse. In the words of the poet Ahmed Higazi, "it's like having a big lion in a little cage".

Valverde Villena's poetry multiplies allusions not only to the literary traditions of several languages, but also to history, anthropology, religion, music and cinema.

Works

Poetry

Anthologies

Essays

Prose translations

Editions

References

  1. ↑ "Poeta de tres patrias: Una poética virreinal para el siglo XXI". 3rd Literature Festival. Copenhagen, Denmark. 2 October 2015.
  2. ↑ Martínez Mesanza, Julio (2002). "Diego Valverde Villena: palabras cultas, palabras vivas". Nueva Revista de Política, Cultura y Arte. 79: 162–64.

Sources

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