It Must Be Said Twice

Rikardo Arregi Diaz de Heredia

It Must Be Said Twice

Alberdania 2012
172 Pages
Original title: Bitan esan beharra
ISBN: 978-84-9868-370-7
Translated into: click here

The title of this poetry book, It Must Be Said Twice, refers to a quote by the American poet Billy Collins that heads the third section of the book. The book consists of three sections: Life=Art, life taken as art, the art of living and the living art; Love Poems Or Something, same sex love, a series of exercises on different styles of love poems, emphasising the tradition prior to Romanticism; and Requiem, in which the topic is the death. Morrissey and Borges, troubadours and gay icons, strict forms and free verse, long and short poems, the simultaneity of opposites, the dissolution of the self… all of this to emphasise that even if one writes about life, love and death, the usual topics, “Much of what is said here/ must be said twice,/ a reminder that no one/ takes an immediate interest in the pain of others”, as Billy Collins wrote.

Rikardo Arregi Diaz de Heredia

Rikardo Arregi Diaz de Heredia published his first book of poems Hari Hauskorrak (Fragile Threads) in 1993. He won the Critics Prize for that book. In 1998 he wrote Kartografia (Cartography), published by Alberdania, which also won the Critics Prize and was translated into Spanish as Cartografía in 2000. His poems can be found in various anthologies of Basque poetry published in other languages such as English (Six Basque Poets, Arc Publications, 2007). He has translated into Basque the Spanish poet Ernestina de Champourcin, the Portuguese poet Jorge de Sena and lately Jospeh Brodsky in 2022. He has worked on the collective book Desira desordenatuak. Queer irakurketak (euskal) literaturaz (Disorderly Desires: Queer Readings in (Basque) Literature), a study on gay issues in Basque literature. He was a member of the editorial board of the online literary magazine Volgako Batelariak.  His latest book of poems is Bitan esan beharra (It Must Be Said Twice), published in 2012, winner of the Spanish Critics Prize, translated to Spanish (Debe ecries dos veces, Salto de Página, 2013).

Rikardo Arregi

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Rikardo Arregi Diaz de Heredia

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