El triunfo de la vida

Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the great English poets of the Romantic era. He was a radical and reformer, whose social and political views conflicted with the conventional thinking and societal norms of his time. He spent the last four years of his life leading a peripatetic existence in Italy, with his wife Mary Shelley, who became famous in her own right as the author of the gothic terror novel Frankenstein. The poet, whose twin passions were for boating and literature, died one month short of his thirtieth birthday in a boating accident off the coast of Liguria. In his short life he produced many masterpieces, but most remained unpublished in his lifetime. Some of his shorter lyric poems are now among the best-loved poems in the English language. At the time of his death Shelley was working on The Triumph of Life, a visionary poem of great power; many people, including the poet T.S. Eliot, regard it as his greatest work. This new translation into Spanish verse, by Luis Castellví (Lecturer in Spanish Studies at the University of Manchester), with an introduction by Prue Shaw (Emeritus Reader in Italian Studies, University College London), honours the poet on the two-hundredth anniversary of his death on 8th July 1822.