Angel Gonzalez Muniz

Angel Gonzalez Muniz Poems

Angel Gonzalez Muniz Biography

Ángel González Muñiz (September 6, 1925 – January 12, 2008) was a major Spanish poet of the twentieth century. González was born in Oviedo. He took a law degree at the University of Oviedo and, in 1950, moved to Madrid to work in Civil Administration. It was in Madrid that he first began to write and publish his poetry, becoming friends with many of the leading Spanish writers who encouraged his work. His first book of poems, Áspero mundo ("Harsh World"), was an immediate critical success. His second book, Grado elemental ("Elementary Grade"), was published in Paris and won the prestigious Antonio Machado Prize for Poetry. He published eight more books of poetry and edited several anthologies and books of literary criticism, including critical editions on the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado. Two books have appeared in English translation: Harsh World and Other Poems (Princeton University Press, 1977, translated by Donald Walsh) and Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Ángel González (Milkweed Editions, 1993, translated by Steven Ford Brown). He is also the recipient of the Angel María de Lera Hispanism Prize for his contributions to Hispanic Culture from the University of Colorado (U.S.), the Príncipe de Asturias Prize (Spain), the Salerno Poetry Prize (Italy) and the Premio Reina Sofía Iberoamericas Prize (Spain). In 1997 he was appointed as the Chair of the Real Academia Española. In 2004 he was awarded the inaugural Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize by the City of Granada. His work is represented in the major anthologies of Spanish poetry of the 20th century, and is also included in the Vintage Book Of Contemporary World Poetry (Random House, 1996). He taught at the University of New Mexico from 1974 to 1994. Before his death in January 2008 in Madrid, he divided his time between New Mexico and Spain.)

The Best Poem Of Angel Gonzalez Muniz

Biographical Detail

When I come to Madrid

the cockroaches in my house complain because I read at night.
The light does not encourage them to leave their hiding places,
and so they lose the chance to crawl around my room,
the place towards which
- for obscure reasons -
they feel an irresistible attraction.
Now they talk of filing a written complaint to the president of the republic,
and I wonder:
what country do they think they live in?
these cockroaches don't read the papers.

What they like is for me to get drunk
and dance tangos till the small hours,
so they may carry out
their constant and senseless prowling, risk free, in the dark
along the wide tiles of my bedroom.

Sometimes I oblige them,
not because I care about their wishes,
but because I feel an irresistible attraction -
for obscure reasons -
towards some badly-lit places
where I can linger with no conscious plan
until the sunrise announces a new day.

Back home,
when I run into their small bodies on the hallway fleeing
with clumsiness and fear
into the gloomy cracks where they nest,
I wish them goodnight unseasonably
- but from the heart, sincerely -
recognizing in me their uncertainty,
their inopportuneness,
their photophobia,
and many other tendencies and attitudes
which - I'm sorry to say -
don't speak much in favour of those orthopterans.

Translated from the Spanish by Gonzalo Melchor

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