Disclaimer - This is the first in a series of posts where I will try (following some personal copyright issues I had) share what I have learned about it.

Louise Glück has been at the center of a controversy about a contractual issue that is taking media edges. This happened as a result of the fact that, after the award of the Nobel, he terminated his contract with the Spanish publishing house 'Pre-texts' and demanded that they destroy all the author's books that remain in stock. From the Editorial they maintain that behind his back, the poet's literary agent takes his work to another publishing house.

In this conflict over the copyright of Glück's Spanish translations, the publishers use their symbolic capital to punish the poet and in this way discipline what they consider "objectionable." From the Editorial they maintain that they had published most of the poetry books of the American writer in Spanish when she was barely known, that they bet on the translation of the poet when she was a practically unknown author. They maintain that it is a relationship that has been going on for fourteen years. Publicly the editor Manuel Borrás said: "We must point out to those who see culture only with the calculator", feel "disappointed and sad" by the betrayal of the Nobel Prize Louise Glück, he is grateful for the "tremendous wave of solidarity" that the case has raised and defends "ethics over profit." He says that at his publishing house they published seven of his books when no one knew her and now The Jackal (as Andrew Wylie, the poet's literary agent, is known) has withdrawn the translation rights.

From the surroundings of Glück they counterattack saying that the contract for the work of Louise Glück expired in 2015 and they did not pay the advance agreed for the signing of the second. That from the Editorial published the translations of Meadowlands in 2017 and A Village Life in 2020 without payment and without consultation.

The truth is that at the time of contracting the contract with the Louise Glück publishing house, she had already obtained the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for her collection of poems The Wild Iris and had been a Poet Laureate of the United States 2003-2004. In other words, she was already a renowned poet, and although the publisher collaborated with her translations to disseminate her work, it is not true that she was unknown.

On the other hand, the attitude of defamatory aggression that the publishing house is having towards the poet is worrying, since it is agitating professionals from the publishing union, from the world of translation and writing in Spanish to sign petitions pressuring the poet to continue a literary contract, under the pretext that Glück's legitimate attitude destroys any possibility of understanding this office as an artistic manifestation. If the Editorial position prevails, a dangerous precedent will be set as it will show that the publishers are the owners of the copyright and not the author himself.