If Only for A Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again): The Selected Poems of Jaime Gil de Biedma

This exquisite dual-language edition of Gil de Biedma’s selected poems reveals the voice of a preeminent poet of mid-20th-century Spain. Gil de Biedma (1929–1990), a closeted gay man and left-wing intellectual who worked as a business executive, lived most of his life under the conservative dictatorship of Franco and was part of a generation of Spanish artists who strived to express themselves in an era of ruthless censorship and repression. As Spencer Reece writes in his foreword, Gil de Biedma’s poems reflected the necessity of disguise: “Gil de Biedma went poetically undetected in a suit, tie, dress shoes, briefcase and his cigarette.” Yet the pressure of wearing a mask also led to poems of remarkable insight, eroticism, and resistance, as the title poem suggests: “we slide back/ toward the two-faced past to shut out/ this terror we feel, same as the one/ we also knew then, day by day.” Forced to self-censor, the speaker sees sex become a painful struggle: “I would fornicate carefully,// feel myself die for each drop/ of pleasure, making it hurt.” These haunting poems astound in their quiet complexity and timeless resonance. (Feb.)