Vicente Aleixandre received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977, at the age of seventy-nine. At the time, his poetry was barely known outside of Spain, and just two small editions were available in American translation. Two years later, Harper & Row brought out Lewis Hyde’s bilingual edition of Aleixandre’s selected poems, A Longing for the Light. When the book was left to go out of print, Copper Canyon published a paperback edition in 1985. Express Books noted in an article on Aleixandre, “A Longing for the Light remains the only readable collection of Aleixandre’s poetry available.”
