Guest of the ilb 2003
Clara Janés was born in Barcelona in 1940, the
daughter of the poet and lecturer Josep Janés. She studied
Philosophy and Literature at the Universities of Barcelona and
Pamplona, and later Comparative Literature and Czech at the Sorbonne in
Paris. She has lived in Madrid ever since.
Clara Janés’s literary work displays an unusual diversity. While
she is particularly well known as a poet, her numerous publications
also include novels, essays, biographies ('La vida callada de Federico
Mompou', 1975; Engl: The Silent Life of Federico Mompou),
autobiographical narrations ('Jardín y Laberinto', 1990; Engl: Garden
and Labyrinth), travel reports and translations. In her
translation work, she has concentrated in particular on Czech poetry
(above all on Vladimír Holan) but has also translated from French
(Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute) and English (Katherine Mansfield,
William Golding). She has recently devoted herself to Persian and
Turkish verse. Moreover, she has published the works of various
Spanish authors and, in the year 2001, also a Spanish edition of a
volume of poetry by Johannes Bobrowski, translated by her daughter
Adriana. Janés has received several awards for her poetry and for
prose and translations alike; she was awarded the renowned Premio Jaime
Gil de Biedma in 2002. Her works have been translated into just
under twenty languages, including Arabic, Persian and Icelandic.
Clara Janés belongs to Spanish literature’s feminist avantgarde, which
has gained in importance since the 80’s and established itself in a
hitherto male-dominated Spanish society that is characterized by an
indelible Catholicism. Her poems in particular reflect her
constant preoccupation with her own dual role as woman and poet.
If she approached this topic in her initial poems ('Las estrellas
vencidas', 1964; Engl: The Defeated Stars) under a rather general
perspective, she plumbed the depths of femininity in the following
decades in ever more intimate ways. The collection 'Kampa' (1986,
written in the 70’s) is considered to be the turning point toward an
assertive erotic literature in which the author links female
self-confidence with erotic fulfillment for the first time. This
vein is continued in 'Eros' (1981) and 'Vivir' (1983, Engl: Life) with
such explicitness and desire that Rosa Chacel called Janés "one of the
great love poets". In her more recent texts she also examines and
re-examines new variants of the relationship between the feminine self,
the body, sensuality and eroticism – for example in the connection
between Eros and death in 'Arcángel de sombra' (1998, Engl: Archangel
of the Shadow).
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