Edward Hopper

This is a dual language edition.

Each poem in Catalan writer Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper is based on a painting by the American artist. Creating a narrative that follows a subject from small-town origins to big-city life, from youth to age, the story is Hopper’s, yet it also belongs to Farrés. The ventriloquist slips, revealing his larger concerns: Farrés is using the paintings to tell a story of modernity.

Lawrence Venuti’s translations recreate the heterogeneous language of Farrés’s poetry in an American vernacular that samples Hopper's actual speech and writing. Farrés’s book becomes in English what it is for Catalan readers: remarkable in ambition, wit, and in its probing interpretations of the visual imagination.

Cover painting: Edward Hopper (1882-1967) Self Portrait, 1925-1930 © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Cover design StephenRaw.com