“The great American painter of solitude comes back to us brilliantly illuminated and transformed . . . This is a book of unexpected splendors.” —Edward Hirsch

“The second Robert Fagles Translation Prize is awarded . . . to Lawrence Venuti's translation of the contemporary Catalan poet Ernest Farrés's Edward Hopper. This work, a sequence of fifty poems, each based on a painting by the American realist artist, is not arranged chronologically according to the dates when the paintings were completed; instead, the poems sketch a narrative that follows a poetic subject in transit from small-town origins to big-city life, from the search for a job to a career in art, from bachelorhood to love and companionship, from youth to age . . . The poems do not merely rehearse the facts of the painter's life or his cantankerous opinions. The ventriloquism slips, as Mr. Venuti says, and the interrogative force of the writing constantly reminds us of the strange amalgamation of the Catalan poet and the American icon into a single being.” —Richard Howard, judge, the National Poetry Series's Robert Fagles Translation Prize