Josep Maria Castellet wrote a highly interesting introduction to the book Memoria y deseo. Poesía 1963-1983, a poetry collection by Vázquez Montalbán, published in 1986, which can be read on the Internet Archive. In it he explains that, at a lecture he gave within the framework of the Menéndez Pelayo International University, he said, in response to a question he was asked, the following sentence:
Mire usted, yo soy un poeta
that is,
Look here, I am a poet.
Castellet states:
Pensaba –y pienso todavía– que si algún día alguien emprende el estudio, en su conjunto, de su extensa producción literaria tendría que empezar por la poesía, donde, a mi entender, se encuentran la mayoría de las claves para comprender una obra de múltiples resonancias, expresada a través de muy diversos géneros literarios.
Translated into English it would be:
I thought –and I still think– that if one day someone were to undertake the study, as a whole, of his extensive literary production, they would have to begin with poetry, where, in my view, most of the keys to understanding a work of multiple resonances are to be found, expressed through a wide variety of literary genres.
Later on he says:
Vuelvo atrás, para insistir en que la indagación sobre su poesía es imprescindible para la comprensión del universo simbólico del autor, de su sentido ético, de su coherente, estólida y escéptica concepción del mundo
that is,
I return to this point, to insist that inquiry into his poetry is indispensable for understanding the author's symbolic universe, his ethical sense, and his coherent, stolid, and skeptical conception of the world.
On the other hand, Túa Blesa, in an article published in the magazine El Cultural on the occasion of the publication of the book Poesía Completa (Memoria y Deseo), which contains the complete poetic work of Vázquez Montalbán, writes:
Fruto de un compromiso con su tiempo y consigo mismo, sus poemas inscriben los diferentes lenguajes de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, desde las canciones que la radio popularizó, sobre todo, en los años 40, lo que habla de una sagaz capacidad de escucha para la cultura popular. Se cumple con esta estrategia de los injertos la función de memoria, personal a la vez que colectiva, esto es, testimonio de un tiempo, que, el título general proclama. [...] Se trataría, entonces, de hacer de este lenguaje poético una lengua de lenguas, un discurso en el que toda palabra, sea cual sea su estatus, su nivel social, encaja en el conjunto con una precisión que parece un fenómeno natural, cuando no es sino resultado de la técnica de un escritor sobresaliente. [...] Sí, con razón Vázquez Montalbán pudo decir "Mire, usted, yo soy un poeta". Este libro da fe de ello.
This is an attempt at a translation:
The result of a commitment to his time and to himself, his poems inscribe the different languages of the second half of the twentieth century, from the songs that radio popularized, especially in the 1940s, which speaks to a keen capacity for listening to popular culture. Through this strategy of grafting, the function of memory is fulfilled, at once personal and collective, that is, a testimony of a time, as the general title proclaims. [...] It would thus be a matter of turning this poetic language into a language of languages, a discourse in which every word, whatever its status or social level, fits into the whole with a precision that seems like a natural phenomenon, when it is nothing other than the result of the technique of an outstanding writer. [...] Yes, rightly Vázquez Montalbán could say "Look here, I am a poet." This book bears witness to it.
All of this motivates my question. If Vázquez Montalbán’s poetry plays such an important role in twentieth-century culture, if it contains the key to fully understanding the rest of his literary work, are there any poems by Vázquez Montalbán that have been translated into another language? (excluding those that appear in his novels, such as the ones we can read in this question and in this other one). I have been searching the Internet for quite some time, but I haven’t managed to find anything.
