During the post-civil war era, General Francisco Franco’s fascist government forbade the people of Spain’s Catalonia region from speaking, reading, and writing in Catalan, a crime punishable by imprisonment or execution. Throughout these years, the work of Catalan poets could only be found via the underground. Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve traveled to meet each of the poets featured in this anthology, embarking on the long road of joy, pain, and friendship that is the work of translation. These fourteen poets, like fourteen blackbirds, provide keen angles of perception in beautiful and lyrical poetry, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes nostalgic, and always engaging, until now almost entirely unknown to U.S readers.

Marlon L. Fick holds a BA from the University of Kansas, an MA from New York University, and PhD from the University of Kansas. He is author of two poetry collections published in Mexico and of the novel The Nowhere Man (Jaded Ibis, 2015), and editor/translator of The River Is Wide / El río es ancho: Twenty Mexican Poets (New Mexico, 2005). Having received fellowships from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts and ConaCulta in Mexico; the Ramon Llull Award for Literature in Catalonia; and a Best American Literary Translator award from the Latitudes Foundation, he now teaches at the University of Texas–Permian Basin.

Francisca Esteve was born in Spain in València, grew up in Barcelona, and joined the anti-fascist resistance movement that struggled to keep Catalan culture alive. She trained at Escuela de Artes Aplicadas Massana and became a painter, eventually immigrating to Mexico City. After she and Marlon Fick married, they lived in China before coming to live in the United States in 2014.