Hugo Mujica Argentina

Hugo Mujica (b. Buenos Aires, 1942) is one of Argentina’s top intellectuals and one of the leading poets in the Spanish language. At the age of thirteen, he began working at a glass factory, taking over for his father, who was blinded in a work accident. Ten years later, in the early sixties, he arrived in the USA and spent the decade in Greenwich Village and at the Free University, studying and practising the visual arts. He later became a Trappist monk and took a seven-year vow of silence. He has been a Catholic priest for more than two decades.

Mujica’s work is wide-ranging, covering philosophy, anthropology, fiction, and poetry. His award-winning verse, made up of more than twenty volumes, has been published in fifteen countries. In 2013, Vaso Roto, one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most prestigious presses, published his Complete Poetry, 1983-2011. That same year, he won Spain’s coveted Casa de América Poetry Prize with Cuando todo calla.

Paradise Empty: Poems 1983-2013 in a bilingual edition offers the English-speaking reader for the first time a representative selection of all of Mujica’s poetry, where idea and feeling, synthesis and eloquence, truth and beauty come together.

(2015)