José María Valverde Pacheco

José María Valverde Pacheco (1926-1996) was a Spanish poet, essayist, literary critic and translator. Born in Valencia de Alcántara, Cáceres, he studied philosophy at the University of Madrid and took his doctorate with a thesis on Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language.

He taught in Rome from 1949 to 1954, and in 1956, aged twenty-nine, was appointed to the chair of Aesthetics at the University of Barcelona.

He resigned that chair in 1965 in solidarity with colleagues sanctioned by the Franco regime, and spent the following years teaching in North America — at the University of Virginia, McMaster University and Trent University — before returning to Barcelona, where he died in 1996.

His poetry won the Premio Nacional de Poesía for La espera and the Premio Ciutat de Barcelona for his collected poems; in 1990 he received the Premio Nacional a la Obra de un Traductor for his body of work as a translator.

With Martín de Riquer he wrote the Historia de la literatura universal, and he translated more than thirty authors into Spanish, among them James Joyce, Shakespeare, Rilke, Hölderlin, Goethe, Melville, Dickens and Jane Austen.