Translating Concha Méndez’s poetry

Concha Méndez was a Spanish poet, dramatist, printer and editor, who was most active as a writer between the 1920s and the 1940s. Part of the ‘Generation of 27’, alongside people such as Luis Buñuel and García Lorca, she defied gender stereotypes to write and travel widely. The Spanish Civil War made her a lifelong exile, and she lived the second half of her life in Mexico. Over the course of her life, her poems shift from vibrant statements of desire and possibility, through grief at the loss of her first child and her country, to an expression of the role of the poet as truth-teller in the world.

Two of my translations of Méndez’s earlier work appear in Modern Poetry in Translation, No. 3, 2023 and can be read online.

More of my translations of her work appear in Shearsman, issues 141 & 142 (2024).