If Only For A Moment (I'll Never Be Young Again)

In Jaime Gil de Biedma's If Only For a Moment (I'll Never Be Young Again), masterfully translated by James Nolan, I read a poetry that survives under pressure. These are poems that yearn for a lost Spain as our speaker longs for his youth. As Nolan attests in his introduction, these poems don’t know that Almodóvar will swagger down Calle Amor de Dios in a few years. Poetry outlasts Franco and AIDS. A poet like Gil de Biedma will add to the record of what life was like under oppression. Gil de Biedma fills in what was lost.

Here is a restless, questioning, questing spirit, whose poems stand like swinging doors through which the poet ceaselessly crosses the borders between the life we live and the life we imagine. The Spain de Biedma navigates is a zone of deep transformation, and though it’s scary — even mournful — his clarity of vision is exhilarating. We pass through 'the long tunnel of this kiss' aroused into sentience, exactly as we close our eyes and tongue oblivion. 'I shut/my eyes but the spirit’s eyes/ stay open till it hurts.' There’s something profoundly modern about the sense of loss, something instinctively post-modern about the narrator’s awareness of his task, and some abiding hunger for history that defies time as 'a passionate/ call to the future, in the worst of times.'

Modernism often envisions the poet as a figure like Antigone—caught up in a spectacular confrontation between liberation and tyranny. But what happens when revolution isn’t an option? When open defiance must give way to hidden resistance? When survival depends on cultivating quiet, unseen connections—like mycelial networks threading beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to emerge?Jaime Gil de Biedma, a gay Catalian poet writing under Franco’s regime, wrestled with these very dilemmas. His strategies—both personal and poetic—for survival and for truly living included masks and adaptations, recycling and irony, self-scrutiny and eroticism. He drew on 'household words worn warm with use' to make works that not only anticipated Spain’s cultural liberation after Franco’s death in 1975 but also resonate powerfully today. Gil de Biedma’s poetry endures as proof of the effectiveness of these strategies. As Spencer Reece writes in his foreword, 'Poetry remains indestructible. Poetry outlasts Franco and AIDS.' Gil de Biedma reminds us that even under repressive regimes, people can carve out sanctuaries where life and freedom persist, waiting for their chance to break through: 'It all boils down to being alive for a moment… / when we break away into / the best of all impossible worlds.' James Nolan’s translations of Gil de Biedma offer a timeless source of encouragement for all who endure repression and tyranny.

In this brilliant bilingual edition, Jaime Gil de Biedma (and translator James Nolan) stage suits of poems committed to beauty and resistance, weaving together a politics filled with erotic charges, fierce candor, and a lilting descent into the past. Forfeiting nostalgia for a fierce look at the way personal and cultural histories collide, his collection remains true to de Biedma's desire, as he says in his introduction, "be the poem" rather than the poet, this much overdo collection gives us a glimpse into the aftermath of both violence and love.