Juan Barja He is a writer and translator, and has worked as an editor for twenty years at the Akal publishing house. In addition to his poetry (in 2022 he published “Música Blanca” (Abada), a collection of all his collected poems), he has published books of essays, including Hipótesis Babel (2007, in collaboration with Julián Jiménez), Ausencia y forma (2008), Historia – Sueño – Fin (2010), Constelaciones/Atlas Benjamin (2010, in collaboration with W. Nerdinger; translated into German as Walter Benjamin: Eine Reflexion in Bildern, Munich, 2011), Nudos de Tiempo (2014), and Pasos. Los espacios del nómada (2016, in collaboration with Patxi Lanceros).

As a translator, he has a considerable number of published works to his credit, including works by authors such as Epictetus (Greek), G. Perec (French), Marco Polo (French), G. Trakl (German), Leonardo da Vinci (Italian), R. Luxemburg (German), Adelbert v. Chamisso (German), Romain Rolland (French), etc., the great bilingual edition of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (Italian), and his most recent work, "The Duino Elegies" by Rainer Maria Rilke (German).

He is also responsible for the Spanish editions of the Complete Works of Walter Benjamin and the Complete Poetry of Fernando Pessoa (bilingual and annotated edition). He is a co-founder of the journals Sileno, Minerva, and Iluminaciones, and the founder of Sur, a school for artistic professions.

From 2004 until his retirement in 2019 he was Director del Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid.