The Book Behind the Dune

<p><em>The Book Behind the Dune</em> is a long unitary poem about the birth of a poetic consciousness and its development in a world marked by the discovery of beauty eroticism and the reality of evil. Influenced by St. Augustine <em>The Cloud of Unknowing</em> and Wordsworth’s <em>The Prelude</em> the poem full of literary artistic and philosophical references is simultaneously a meditation on the meaning of time and its manifestations—its epiph-anies—in a concrete life. The reflection on historical time leads the poet to the reality of “the pain of the world” but also towards a world that is incessantly and continually beginning. As Yves Bonnefoy puts it “Sánchez Robayna knows what ‘the new time’ expects of us which Rimbaud foresaw as ‘very severe’.”</p><p><em>The Book Behind the Dune</em> (<em>El libro tras la duna</em>) already translated into French Italian Czech German and Arabic is presented here for the first time in English.</p>