Ramón María del Valle Inclán, Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War
Translated by Elizabeth Drumm
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ISBN: 978-1-839546-04-4 (hardback) • RRP £39.99, $54.99, €45.99 ISBN: 978-1-839546-05-1 (paperback) • RRP £16.99, $23.99, €20.99 ISBN: 978-1-839546-06-8 (JSTOR ebook) Access online: Books@JSTOR Although highly respected within Spain as an author, public intellectual, and cultural provocateur, Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936) is little known outside his native country. This edition will help remedy this by presenting the first English translation of Valle-Inclán’s innovative First World War chronicle, accompanied by a critical introduction that situates the author within the central concerns of European modernism. A remarkable innovator, who wrote poetry, novels, drama, essays, and art criticism, Valle-Inclán was a strong influence on a generation of literary and visual artists, and his work is in conversation with the literary experimentation of modernists such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Midnight is a powerful account of Valle-Inclán’s experiences on the Western Front in 1916. From a distant, all-encompassing perspective, what Valle-Inclán refers to as ‘astral vision’, the Poet who ‘deserves to be called Seer’ creates out of the devastating fragments that characterize individual experience of war a view of the whole, outside of time and space. Midnight’s distillation of experience brings into sharp relief the horrors of war and the suffering of those caught up in it. Valle-Inclán’s desire to disengage experience from its fragmentary expression in language, and to observe from a position of cosmic omniscience, along with the theosophical underpinnings of his aesthetics, inspired literary innovations that ensure his place among the foremost modernists of Europe and the Americas. Elizabeth Drumm is John B. and Elizabeth M. Yeon Professor of Spanish and Humanities at Reed College, Portland. For a contents listing, see this volume at JSTOR. Bibliography entry: Drumm, Elizabeth (trans.), Ramón María del Valle Inclán, Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War, New Translations, 20 (MHRA, 2025) First footnote reference: 35 Ramón María del Valle Inclán, Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War, trans. by Elizabeth Drumm, New Translations, 20 (MHRA, 2025), p. 21. Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Drumm, p. 47. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Bibliography entry: Drumm, Elizabeth (trans.). 2025. Ramón María del Valle Inclán, Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War, New Translations, 20 (MHRA) Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Drumm 2025: 21). Example footnote reference: 35 Drumm 2025: 21. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) This title is distributed on behalf of MHRA by Ingram’s. Booksellers and libraries can order direct from Ingram by setting up an ipage Account: click here for more. Permanent link to this title: www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Ramón-María-del-Valle-Inclán-Midnight www.mhra.org.uk/publications/nt-20 |
30 September 2025 • 90pp