Bridging the Divide #5 | Interview : James Womack, translator

James Womack is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese Section at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College. He reveals how he landed in Spain and translating Manuel Vilas’s latest collection of poetry and short fiction, Heaven, published this year by Carcanet Press. The author of fourteen collections of poetry, seven books of essays, and seven novels, Vilas’s novel Ordesa was a bestseller in Spain; is forthcoming in English with Canongate in November 2020. 
  
“Vilas is exceptionally skilled at capturing the misery and ecstasy that can coincide and enmesh in a single moment . . . Emotional depth and layers of meaning shine through Womack’s rhythmic translation and his use of extraordinary vocabulary . . . As in all great poetry, ordinary and unsuspecting moments are suddenly infused by a subliminal energy that transforms a mundane thought or event into a profound and valid realisation” . . . From the review by Rachel Goldblatt for The BookBlast Diary 

Presented by Georgia de Chamberet | Produced by Rupert Such