Quixote Variations

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Quixote Variations is a long poem written by Spanish anarchist Ramon Fernandez in the early 1920s. Published in Spanish journals and newspapers in fragments, Alfred Noyes has assembled and translated what he considers to be “as true and authoritative a draft as possible” of a poem well-known in Spanish literary circles as a late masterwork of “modernismo” – but one which never appeared in a complete or stable version, let alone in book form. At once a daring revision of that touchstone of Spanish literature, Don Quixote, and a call to aesthetic revolution, the Quixote Variations blends politics and art into a noisy and devastating hybrid. “A distant flame / and a sword far off,” its sense of the oppressive presence of the past sounds as authentic a note today as it did in catalyzing the Madrid literary scene almost 90 years ago. As Federico Garcia Lorca recalled in the early 1930s, “‘Fernandez Fernandez Fernandez’ – it’s the most ordinary of Spanish names. And yet, in Madrid in the early 1920s, the name was on everyone’s lips, and everyone was quoting lines from his poem.”

This painstaking translation – at which Noyes has been at work for many years – is accompanied by the translator’s introduction and an afterword by poet and critic Stephen Collis.

RAMON FERNANDEZ was a Spanish poet and anarchist union organizer. Born in Granada, he was a shadowy figure on the fringe of the 1920s literary scene in Madrid . After working for many years in a Barcelona boot factory, and occasionally publishing in anarchist newspapers, he joined the Ascaso Column at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and disappeared on the Aragonese front.

ALFRED NOYES is a poet and translator. His Compression Sonnets was published by Bookthug in 2006. He lives near Vancouver British Columbia.

STEPHEN COLLIS is a poet and critic. His third book of poetry, The Commons, was published by Talonbooks in 2008. He lives in Vancouver and teaches at Simon Fraser University.