The Music That Survives the Cut: On Dylan Thomas, “Poesía completa” 1934–1952, (El Cuenco de Plata, Buenos Aires 2025)

Translated by Patricia Ogan Rivadavia and Esteban Moore. Bilingual edition.

Dylan Thomas is one of those poets who sound inevitable. The vowels feel carved, the consonants click into place, and even the images that shouldn’t work somehow sing. Bringing that voice into Spanish is the kind of dare translators accept only if they have both courage and pitch. This new bilingual Poesía completa, 1934–1952 from El Cuenco de Plata shows that Patricia Ogan Rivadavia and Esteban Moore have both. The result is a generous, lively, and deeply readable Thomas for Spanish-language readers; faithful to the grain of the original yet fluent in the textures of contemporary Spanish.

We’ve had full Spanish Thomas before: Elizabeth Azcona Cranwell’s pioneering Poemas completos (Corregidor, 1974) and Margarita Ardanaz Morán’s Poesía completa (Visor, 2004). Both opened doors. Ogan Rivadavia and Moore don’t court novelty for novelty’s sake. They tune the instrument. Page after page, the question is not “Is this literal?” but “Does it move like Thomas?” Most of the time, the answer is yes.

The book frames Thomas with three sharp prefaces: Paul Muldoon, Marianne Moore, Kenneth Rexroth, which read like a chorus warming up the hall. Muldoon underscores how Thomas lets even first-time readers believe poetry is “vital” to daily life; Moore stresses that eerie, natural precision; Rexroth, with claws out, calls it a werewolf heart. Those notes are right. Thomas is visceral and exact, romantic and ferocious, often in the same breath. The translations meet him in that double register.

Consider the great creed of resilience, “And death shall have no dominion.” The translators retain the liturgical swing of the refrain:“Y la muerte no tendrá dominio.” They keep the iconic starry anatomy,“ellos tendrán estrellas en los codos y a sus pies”, and the triple tolling of the title line across the poem’s stanzas. The Spanish pacing is unhurried and solemn; you can hear the oars enter the water:

“Y la muerte no tendrá dominio.”

“ellos tendrán estrellas en los codos y a sus pies;”

“y la muerte no tendrá dominio.”

What I admire is the translators’ taste for strangeness. They resist tidying up Thomas. The poet’s unsettling “unicorn evils” stays weird as “los males del unicornio”, a choice that honors the poem’s mythic menace. Thomas’s line “Heads of the characters hammer through daisies” becomes “sus cabezas golpearán contra las malvas”, a tilt from daisies to mallows that still preserves the shock of skulls meeting petals. The image shifts color, yes, but the violence of tenderness, the hammering among flowers, survives.

The translators are equally sure-footed with Thomas’s early sea lyric “We lying by seasand”. Their Spanish leans into the poem’s chromatic obsession with yellow and the see-saw mood of grave/gay. “Nosotros, tendidos en la arena, contemplando el amarillo / y el grave mar…” preserves the opening tableau and the oxymoronic tone:

“un llamado al color llama en el viento,

que es grave y alegre como la tumba y el mar”

That echo, llamado… llama, finds a Spanish solution to Thomas’s own games with repetition and sound. And where the English carries the kingly cadence of “Bound by a sovereign strip”, the Spanish meets it with “Ceñidos a una franja soberana”, an elegant equivalence that puts the golden shoreline back on its throne. The closing lift is gorgeous in either language: “Breaks, O my heart’s blood, like a heart and hill”, and the translators risk the strangeness that line demands: “oh sangre de mi corazón, como un corazón y una colina”. The music holds. 

If any single poem tests a translator’s nerve, it’s the villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”. Here the metric and rhetorical machinery is unforgiving. One needs a refrain that can bear repetition without dulling, consonants that punch, vowels that carry heat. The new version chooses a verb of defiance over a noun of fury, and it works:

“No entres mansamente en esa noche bondadosa,

la vejez debe quemar, bramar al fin del día;

a la muerte de la luz, desafía, desafía.”

Is “desafía” the same as “Rabia, rabia”? Not exactly. It is less primal and more combative. But Spanish has to balance register with speakability. This choice keeps the villanelle’s breath and avoids a false-friend flatness of rabia as mere anger. The translators then land the poem’s plea to the father with direct, affecting clarity:

“Y tú, mi padre, allí en la penosa altura

maldice, bendíceme ahora con tus fieras lágrimas, te ruego.

No entres mansamente en esa noche bondadosa.”

The tone is intimate and urgent. The lineation paces the prayer. Nothing clanks.

Elsewhere, in “Love in the Asylum”, the translators trust Thomas’s lunatic delicacy. “A girl mad as birds” becomes “una joven tan loca como los pájaros”, and the famous “heaven-proof house” reappears as “la casa a prueba de cielo”, a crisp, uncanny image. They honor the grotesque grace notes:“camina libre como los muertos”; “los pisos del manicomio gastados por los pasos de mis lágrimas”, and keep the final burst of cosmic eros intact:

“finalmente podré sin duda

soportar la primera visión que prendió fuego a las estrellas.”

If the English has a trumpet’s clarity, “Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars”, the Spanish has a chalice’s depth. The sacrificial tint of “soportar” gives the vision weight.

One of this edition’s quiet strengths is how it handles Thomas’s syntax. He loves long, accumulating clauses that lift and buckle like waves. Spanish can seize up under that pressure. Ogan Rivadavia and Moore manage the breath without resorting to clumsy punctuation or explanatory padding. They keep the current moving. In “We lying by seasand,” for example, the sentence that tunnels through lunar silences and tide-masters works in Spanish as a single articulated flow. The phrasing “el seco amo de las mareas / emballenado entre el desierto y la tempestad” is a fine piece of carving: emballenado is chewy and exact, and it stabilizes the image without pinning it down. 

There are, inevitably, interpretive bets. The choice of malvas for “daisies” will vex some purists and delight some readers. “Rage” recast as “defy” will spark a table-thumping debate in departments and bars. Good. Translation should be a contact sport. What matters is whether the poems survive. They do. The music is there, and the images breathe.

A word on the bilingual format. Facing pages are a gift here. Thomas is a poet of sound; even readers with modest English can glance across and hear why a given Spanish decision was made. That comparative friction is pedagogically rich and aesthetically satisfying. It also keeps the translators honest in the best way: the source is always whispering in the next column.

How does this edition sit beside its predecessors? Azcona Cranwell’s 1974 volume has the aura of first arrival and introduced Thomas to many Spanish readers. It also carries an older idiom that today can feel stately where Thomas wants to be feral. Ardanaz Morán’s 2004 Visor is careful and resourceful but at times over-literal in tone. Ogan Rivadavia and Moore steer between both rocks. They value cadence and contemporaneity without erasing density. When Thomas reaches for the baroque, they follow him without getting lost in velvet.

Three more moments deserve mention in the poems already sampled.

First, the refrain management in “And death shall have no dominion”. The Spanish avoids monotony by tiny, almost invisible shifts in internal rhythm while locking the anaphora in place across all three stanzas. It respects the poem’s prayer shape: sorrow argued into song. 

Second, the diction in “Love in the Asylum.” Thomas’s “house not right in the head” becomes “la casa que está mal de la cabeza,” which keeps the idiomatic madness without turning coy or clinical. The compound image “bouncing wall” slides toward “pared reflectante”. That’s an interpretive choice, less kinetic, more optical, but in context it keeps the scene’s shimmer rather than its slap. 

Third, the tonal paradox in “We lying by seasand”: “grave y alegre” for “grave and gay.” The translators reject the easy archaism and find an everyday pairing that still feels ceremonial. It’s honest Spanish that isn’t afraid of ceremony. 

Thomas, of course, writes often about endings, and this book arrives at a moment when Spanish readers can meet him anew without the fog of remoteness. He is no longer a poet “at school” in translation histories; he is a voice that can enter a current conversation about what lyric urgency is for. In these versions he sounds like a poet of the present, not a preserved exhibit. That matters. Poems either live in a language or they don’t. These live.

If you care about the craft of translation, you’ll find reasons to argue, over a word, a cadence, a hue. If you care about poetry, you’ll be grateful for a book that returns Thomas’s extravagance to the page with clarity and heat. And if you are new to him, you could do worse than begin here, reading the Spanish aloud and letting the English ghost along beside it, like the tide under the sand.

The last lines I’ll quote belong to the villanelle that has sent so many of us back into the world more stubborn than before. In English: “And you, my father, there on the sad height, / Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray”. In Spanish: “Y tú, mi padre, allí en la penosa altura / maldice, bendíceme ahora con tus fieras lágrimas, te ruego”. The plea is the same. The flame is the same. Language changes suit; the pulse does not.

Verdict: an essential, generous Thomas for Spanish. Buy it, teach it, lend it, keep it. And read it aloud. Rage can have very good manners in Spanish; so can wonder.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume

Editor-in-Chief