A Dictionary of Symbols (Broché)

Juan Eduardo Cirlot (1916-1973) was born in Barcelona, where he studied music with Fernando Ardévol and moved in the circle of the composer Manuel de Falla. In the 1940s, his interests turned to poetry and art criticism, and he figured prominently in the Dau al Set group of avant-garde painters and poets. Joan Miró introduced Cirlot to the surrealist magus André Breton in Paris in 1949, and though Cirlot declined Breton's invitation to join the surrealist group, the two men enjoyed a strong working relationship and were fast friends.
Along with numerous volumes of poetry, Cirlot wrote the first monograph on the work of Miró and several studies of Gaudí, and was the critical champion of informalism and the artist Antoni Tàpies. In 1958, drawing on his vast erudition, which extended to medieval hermeneutics, Eastern art and religion, Sufism, and film, he produced the first edition of A Dictionary of Symbols, a book that he continued to revise and enlarge for the rest of his life.
Cirlot fought in the Spanish Civil War as a Republican, and the publication of his one novel was blocked by the censors of the Franco regime. In the course of his life, Cirlot worked as a customs agent, for a bank, and in publishing. He was also known as an avid collector of medieval swords. Jack Sage (1925-2018) was born in Southampton, England, and attended the vocational school Clark's College and Taunton's School.
After a short stint as an army mechanic, he enrolled at King's College London in 1946, studying Spanish language and music and the theater of Golden Age Spain (1492-1682). In 1956, he was brought on as a lecturer in the Spanish department at King's College, where he would work for the rest of his life—rising to senior lecturer and then department head. He retired in 1990 and spent the next two decades of his life consulting about the Spanish Golden Age for, among others, early-music ensembles, the BBC, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Valerie Miles has translated such writers as Enrique Vila-Matas and Rafael Chirbes, among many others. She is the editor of A Thousand Forests in One Acorn : An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction and, with Azar Nafisi, co-editor of That Other World : Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile. Having co-founded Granta en espanol, she went on to establish the NYRB Classics Spanish-language imprint. In 2013 Miles curated the first exhibition of Roberto Bolano's archive papers, held at Barcelona's Center for Contemporary Culture.
A contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and El Pals, she lives in Barcelona, Spain, where she teaches translation and creative writing at the Pompeu Fabra University.