Biography & Works

Antonio J. del Puig, Baron of La Roda; Benexida and Rafols. Writer and traveller. He was born in Cartagena, (Spain), February 1st, 1960. He attended at Holy Family School, and at Merton College (Oxford University). He was graduated in Business Administration by University of Murcia. From his youthess he was inclined to Literature, perhaps under the influence of his grandparents and mother, and the old familiar library, which was stocked of more than 25.000 copies, even seven incunables.   
After having founded several magazines in his teen and college age, and having frequented the literary circles of Jose M ª Alvarez in Cartagena, Eloy Sánchez Rosillo in Murcia, Guillermo Carnero in Alicante, Ana María Moix and the Nobel Awards Mario Vargas Llosa in Barcelone and London, Rafael Montesinos in Madrid ... He decides to go to Paris when he was 18 years old but he should return in time for university exams, according to the family agreement.
Later he started to travel along the world. He lived in Rome; Paris; Venice; St. Petersbourg; Vienna, Instanbul; The Cairo; Varanasi; Karachi; Shangai; New York; Los Angeles; Stockholm; Samarkand; Khiva; Bokhara, and so on, and he visited more than 70 countries in all over the world.


He made the trip his profession and he worked for a French production company as a writer of screenplayers about travels documentaries for TV. From the sands of Sahara to the North Cape; from the Asiatic jungle to the mountains of Sierra Madre. At the same time, he was writing some poems, articles and translations that were published in several Spanish magazines. Fondly he remembers the magazine "La Luna" and the years of the Madrid scene, in the late 70's and early 80's. His first book of poems was  On Love and Poetry ", published in Barcelona by the publisher Dau al Set also ran as an art gallery in the Gothic Quarter. It was the year of 1985. It gathered the young poet's youth concerns. Even the title betrays an interest in classical literature and reading also spent with a love, now forgotten as all false loves, and for the work of Paul Eluard. The book was very heterogeneous. And everything started. 


WORKS:

He has published the following books: 

1985: On Love and Poetry. A book that brings together youth poems widely dispersed nature, but whose central theme is to understand the poetry as an ordering principle. 

1987: Songs of Night. Book of poems that wanted to be plastic. It is abandoned in stanzas of rhymed poetry of versolibrism forms.

1997: The Inheritance of Mnemosyne. After a long silence due to his studies of ancient religions and ancient languages, the author returns with this book that was first published in Italy. A very ambitious topic book. It wanted to be literary criticism, literary theory, social analsis ... told in a very dark and secretive. The poet returns to the traditional verses. The book is a collection of fifty sonnets and it ends with a long elegy, also fifty verses, which suppresses the letter A. The book itself is an adjective drunk, a real drunk of metaphors. It was received the International Award for Poetry of the Giorgio Anchiolli Foundation in 1998.

2003: Il Giardino d'Armida. (The Garden of Armida). First book of essays. Collect a variety of topics that are the sources of the poems written in the early books. There is a need but to theorize, they reflect on what he has been written. It was only written and published in Italian. 

2004: The Typographic Art in Cartagena. The author, after nearly twenty years outside of his country, returned to Spain, specifically the city of Cartagena. He studies the advent of printing to your city, discovering five printings oldest known before, and a printer who worked in the city without any news from him so far, but he printed the book "The Devotion to the Archangel San Miguel" written by Francisco Rodriguez, who published in full as a second appendix. Typographic Art ... is, above all, a book of attachment, the pressing need for someone who wants to recover their lost or forgotten roots. 

2006: Theatre of Loves and Passions. New book of poems. The book is very impersonal and cold. They are poems of love written to objects from his private collection of antiquities. The book remembers when Von Platen wrote poems of love to the paintings that he saw when he arrived in Venice for the first time. The title starts with an archaic, theater, reminiscent of the old emblematic books -gender that are lost forever- is the meaning to show. This book was translated into eleven languages.

2007: The Wound of Aristeus. It was presented as an anthology. The book offers a selection of translations of the author, the translation always gave the up most importance. The book introduces the novelty that was recorded on a CD. 

2008: Il Covo del Bosco (Bosco's Lair). It was published in limited edition bibliophile and collect the verses of Theatre of Passions and Legends with color pictures of objects sung in the book. The text is written in Italian, Spanish, English, French and German. 

2008: Poets of Cartagena in the Silver Age. The author, in this year's feverish studying the poets of his city, from romanticism to modernism. It is another book of attachment of the poet to the city where he wants to die. 

2008: Dangling Shadows, (2 tomes). Custom paper for the U.S. market. The first tome examines the authors who most influenced his work is hugging the twentieth century. In the second tome examines the most important American writers in the twentieth century. 

2008: My World. Also a travel book written exclusively for the U.S. market as the previous. It reflects the experiences of the author's travels countries around the five continents. The difficulty of the road and the destination as a paradise on earth. It speaks of linear and cyclic journey, influencing a bit on the thesis of Claudio Magris. 

2009: The Vision of Labyrinth. Book that studies the most prominent printers, since the creation of the book in the fifteenth century to the end of the scale of the book, in the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, still making copies of your own library. The book is enriched with many illustrations and studied with special attention to best illustrators in all over time. 


2010: A year of madness feverish literary activity of the arrest product relentlessly achieved. It first appears another book of poems, The Burning City, a book of Horatian tone which sings the quiet and peaceful life while watching the grand spectacle of a crumbling civilization again.

2010: In the same year is the mandatory book called literary Poetical. It is a short treatise like all books on this subject. One of the most anti-commercial books that can be written nowadays. It is written under the tutelage of Aristotle and Horace but not wanting to reconcile them, shifting his theories to the problems of modern Spanish poetry. 


2010: The first book printed in Murcia: Margarita poetica of Albrechy von Eyb.

A bilbiographic research book where the author renews the method of the studies in this discipline. So far, bibliographers had studied libraries to classify the prints and printing of books. This book explores the inventories of major Spanish libraries in the XVth Century made . They are a lot of unknown works that only time will sort in place. Through a letter found in the Archives of Simancas builds the true story of a printer, Theodoric the German, and comes to find work, first printed in the Kingdom of

Murcia, who owned the libraries of Isabel I of Castile and Alfonso de Rojas. 


Early next year, 2011, you receive a book of poems entitled The Late Bleeding, which is already printed. A book about the authors who most influenced the author in his youthness, who formed their individual fee and, over time, they still are.

Soon to appear Candles burning -his first novel- and the book of short stories The Time and the Shadow.


TRANLATIONS:


From the beginning, Antonio J. del Puig has seen translations as a very important part of their writing. The translation is presented as a recreation of translated text. His translations always have in common that are first translations into Spanish and they are translated from their original language, sometimes in collaboration.


1985: Carmina Burana. Translated in collaboration with Isabel Pérez-Crespoo. Goliardic medieval texts. 


1987: Dracontius: Selected poems. Also in collaboration with Isabel Perez-Crespo. A minor Latin poet. 


1990: Venus and Tannhäuser of Aubrey Beardsley. The novel's young and wicked illustrator Mr. Beardsley that was never published in Spain.


2007: Leconte de Lisle: Selected Poems. The most important poet of the so-called French Parnassians. 


2008: Anthology of Poetry of the Southern of the United States. Study and translation of the poetry from the origins of Southern until the Civil War. The Southern had become influenced by Borges, in a literary topic for the Spanish poets of the "Generation of 70" or "Venetians" or "Culturalists", which were the adoptive parents of the author. This book jumped from metaphor to reality, because it showed how it was that poetry actually.

2010: Pearl poetic. Scattered translations made over the life of the author. They are collected from translations of Sanskrit poets as Amaru or Dharmakirti to Japanese poets contemporaries as Tajuri Miyohi or Kaori Maruyama; from the Swedish Baroque Georg Stiernhielm to Lorenzo de Medici; from Provencal late as Gilabert de Proixita or Italian (Tuscan) incipient Guittone d'Arezzo to classical Persian poetry as Alesha Navoi or Malay folk songs, pduangs,  that the author collected from the islands of Polynesia to the hinterland. 

2010: Anthology of Bulgarian Poetry. In collaboration with Andrea Teodorova. It is anthologized the most representative poets of the twentieth century Bulgarian poetry.

Some of his poems were chosen for the anthology Ten voices or new millennium (1993-2007), which appeared in 2007. 
Nowadays he is working on writing the first History of the Spanish Silversmiths. 

He was appointed Professor Extraordinary in Comparative Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico City and the University of Guadalajara (Jalisco). He has received mentions&awards from Fordham University of New York; the Catholic University of Dallas; University of Southern California, Los Angeles; University of North Carolina and the Gold Medal of the University of Pisa.

His works has been translated into 16 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Swedish, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, Turkish, Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Arabic and Thailand.


LINKS:

Antonio J. del Puig, Página Oficial. (in Spanish language).