Ángel Crespo

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Ángel Crespo was born in 1926 and died in 1995. He was one of Spain's most significant poets and translators of the second half of the twentieth century.

Crespo was the author of over thirty books of poetry. He also published over twenty books of translations (ranging from the work of Dante and Petrarch to that of Fernando Pessoa and Eugénio de Andrade) and numerous works of literary criticism. One of Spain's most prestigious translation prizes, the Premio de Traducción Ángel Crespo, was named after him.

Crespo was raised in the La Mancha region of Spain. Early in his career, he was associated with Carlos Edmundo de Ory and the Postism literary movement. He was labeled a traitor under Spain’s Franco regime for signing a petition to protest the torture of miners in Asturias. Afterwards, he participated in clandestine antigovernment activities until he was eventually driven into exile. He lived with his wife, translator and professor Pilar Gómez Bedate, in various places including Sweden and Puerto Rico before returning to Spain in the 1980s.

Victor García de la Concha, professor at the University of Salamanca and Director of the Royal Spanish Academy, has written that “few Spanish poets of the last forty years have achieved a voice as vital and sustained as Ángel Crespo.” His work is often surreal and manifests a deep engagement with nature and the classics. Some of his best work came in the aphorism and prose poem forms. His primary English-language translator is Steven J. Stewart, who was awarded a translation fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005 for his work on Crespo's prose poems.