Gabriel Ferrater is a poet of personal experience, a poet who succeeds like no other in capturing the feeling of Catalan society during, and after, the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). His remarkable poetry is presented in this volume in an equally remarkable translation by the late Arthur Terry whose affinity with the poet is not only declared in his translator's preface but is also self-evident from the powerful poetic 'voice' he creates in English. Terry started to translate Ferrater whilst Professor of Spanish at Queen's University, Belfast in the 1960s. Here he met the young Seamus Heaney and other members of the Belfast Writing Group who came under the spell of both Ferrater and Terry as Heaney describes in his illuminating introduction to this volume.
