Sandscript
AUTHOR
José Oliver
TRANSLATOR
Marc James Mueller
Sandscript is a powerful collection of poetry by acclaimed Spanish poet José Oliver, translated into English by Marc James Mueller. The poems navigate themes of identity, displacement, and cultural heritage, drawing on Oliver's Andalusian roots and his experience as the son of Spanish agricultural workers. Through spare yet evocative language, Oliver creates a poetic landscape where memory and geography intertwine, exploring what it means to belong to multiple worlds simultaneously. The collection examines borders—both geographical and linguistic—while celebrating the resilience of marginalized voices. Mueller's translation captures the musicality and emotional depth of Oliver's work, introducing English-language readers to one of contemporary Spanish poetry's most distinctive voices.
Reviews
"Oliver's dream of "an open language," which mixes the cadences and inflections of his Andalusian roots with the inventive possibilities of German, reminds us that foreignness is our true condition. He bridges ethnic and non-ethnic German in sandscript, which explores some of the same broken terrain mapped by another brave traveler in the language, Paul Celan, and what he encounters line by line is a self that is at once foreign and familiar: "my poem my word." Here is the work of a man who is 'German and still not German, Spanish and still not Spanish, on the move: Me.' You will find him everywhere."
—Christopher Merrill, author of Necessities
Marc James Mueller is a contributor to White Pine Press.
José F.A. Oliver is considered one of the most important poets of his generation in Germany. He has published more than fourteen volumes of poetry.