Salvador Espriu Research Articles

Myth Transformation in Salvador Espriu’s “Phaedra”, “Antigone” and “The Story of Esther”

The paper deals with the Catalan author Salvador Espriu (1913–1985), who interpreted ancient myths in his works “Phaedra”, “Antigone” and “The Story of Esther” from a new point of view. The subject of the study was the analysis of the story “Phaedra”, the dramas “Antigone” and “The Story of Esther”, as a result of which we determine how the mythological heritage of the past was transformed and which models of myth transformation were used by Salvador Espriu in these texts. The work also examines the incorporation of ancient and Old Testament myths into the historical and political context of the 30–40s of the twentieth century.

The voice of the cypresses: Cyrus Cassells and the poetry of Salvador Espriu

Author/s
 Dídac Llorens CubedoUniversidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain
 
 ABSTRACT
 “To the cypress again and again” is Cyrus Cassells’s poetic response to the work of Salvador Espriu, a poet whose reception has been limited by his belonging to a minority culture and his commitment to the Catalan language. In its first eight sections, the poem reads as a dramatic monologue: its author adopts Espriu’s voice, successfully evoking his poetic world. In what could be considered the second part of the poem, a different poetic speaker  identifiable with Cassells  shares personal memories of Espriu: the man, his nation and his culture. At the end of the poem, the emblematic cypresses are identified with the Catalan people and their voice is heard. The poem is an example of epistolary elegy, a mode that allows Cassells to enter into dialogue with deceased personalities who have had artistic or historical relevance. In so doing, the American poet shows, like Espriu did, an acute sense of cultural tradition.

UN SANTORAL LAIC DE REFERÈNCIA. LES SÈRIES D’ENTREVISTES A FIGURES CULTURALS EN EL TARDOFRANQUISME

Following the path of Josep Pla with Homenots, in the 1960s and 1970s several series of interviews with cultural figures happened at the same time in Catalonia. Baltasar Porcel published interviews in Serra d’Or, Robert Saladrigas in Destino, Lluis Busquets in El Correo Catalan and Montserrat Roig and Joaquim M. Puyal had popular TV interview programs (Personatges and Voste pregunta) on the Catalan channel of Television Espanola. Salvador Espriu, Josep Pla and Merce Rodoreda also appeared in the Spanish TV program A fondo and Antoni Ribas produced the film Catalans universals. This article aims to map all these initiatives as a form of “laybook of saints” for a culture that, having survived the toughest years of the dictatorship, at that point needed new reference names to face a time of profound renewal towards a hypothetical normalization.

Translating the Poetry of Salvador Espriu: A Review with Recommendations

To date, the poetry of Salvador Espriu has appeared in three English-language translated anthologies: by Kenneth Lyons, Magda Bogin and Louis Rodrigues. This study considers the differing approaches and priorities of these translated anthologies volumes, and focuses especially on the problems associated with anthologizing a poet whose work relies heavily on the concept of integrated wholes, in some cases in what could be described as macro-poems. In conclusion, there are suggestions for detailed translation solutions, including a judicious use of rhyming, even where the source text does not employ it.

Ocnos o l'esglai d'una imatge

Summary: Ocnos has a recurring presence in Salvador Espriu’s late works. Although the ambivalent meaning of this mythical figure has been little discussed in modernity, a number of distinguished critics have taken keen interest since Goethe took it up again in his commentary on Pausanies. In fact, the late Espriu portrays, in the stupid uselessness of Ocnos’s work, the failure and the emptiness of the poet and of the human being likewise. Nevertheless, this enigmatic figure holds other meanings which lead us to fear, to paralysing fear, to the so called “parat esglai”. Espriu brings this character in Hades to Sinera and he becomes the axis around which he builds his singular poetics. Keywords: Espriu, Ocnos, Ocnos i el parat esglai, Les roques i el mar, el blau, Johann Jakob Bachofen, matriarchy, archaeology and literature„

“Una novel·la pornográfica, per favor!”: Escándalo y provocación en la literatura catalana (primera mitad del siglo XX)

This article sets out to analyse the role of controversy and scandal in the development of the Catalan literary field during the first half of the twentieth century. The main topics to be explored are the importance of religion and sexuality in the modernista novel, the debates caused by the impact of Freud’s ideas in the 1920s and 1930s and, finally, the moral conservatism of the 1940s and 1950s, which led to the ostracism of several authors. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s ideas and the sociological theory of scandal, this article shows that controversy is an integral element of the literary field which periodically helps to renovate literary techniques. Among the works examined are La dama enamorada (Joan Puig i Ferrater), Josafat (Prundenci Bertrana), Els sots ferestecs (Raimon Casellas), Fanny (Carles Soldevila), Aspectes (Salvador Espriu), Una mena d'amor (Cesar August Jordana), Vida privada (Josep Maria de Sagarra), Laura a la ciutat dels sants (Miquel Llor) and El mar (Blai Bonet).

Jüri Talvet maailmaluule tõlgendajana / Jüri Talvet’s Interpretations of World Poetry

Teesid: Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse professori, luuletaja, kirjandusteadlase ja hispaaniakeelse kirjanduse spetsialisti Jüri Talveti tõlketegevuse viljade hulka kuulub luulet ja proosat nii sajandeid vanast Hispaania klassikast kui ka 20. sajandil või tänapäeval romaani keeltes või inglise keeles loodud teostest. Käesolev artikkel keskendub sellele, kuidas professor Talvet on tõlgendanud luule ja poeetika, kuid ka kirjandusajaloo, iseäranis barokk-kirjanduse alaseid küsimusi oma kirjandusteaduslikes esseedes. Vaadeldakse ka tema tõlketegevuse mahtu ja tõlketöö põhimõtteid. Jüri Talvet (born in 1945) is a poet and a scholar of comparative literature, Chair Professor of World Literature at the University of Tartu. His numerous translations of poetry and poetical fiction from the Romance languages and, to a lesser extent, from English, reflect his views on world poetry. Those views are also expressed in his theoretical writings from the years of 1977 to 2015. Having studied English literature as the main subject at the University of Tartu, he early developed an interest in Spanish, in other Iberian languages, and in the Iberoamerican literatures. His translations from that area include works from medieval and early modern literature as well as notable literary achievements from the 20th century and the contemporary era. Talvet’s interpretations of Federico García Lorca and the “Latin American boom” authors are supported by profound insights into the philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics of the 17th century Spanish Baroque literature, known as the literary Golden Age of Spain. The influence which Talvet’s activities have exerted has widened the horizons of Estonia’s literary culture: while in the early 20th century, the previous German, Russian and Finnish leanings were supplemented by orientations to, and translations from, French and Italian literatures, Talvet has helped to enrich the Estonian literary landscape with the mentality and traditions of even more distant language areas, such as Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and the Latin American countries. In the section “Quevedo and Góngora” of this article, Talvet’s interpretation of some of the key issues of dispute in the Baroque literature of Spain are studied, based both on his theoretical essays and on his translations of the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Talvet has attempted to use the terms of the Baroque philosopher and writer Baltasar Gracián, agudeza, concepto (definable approximately as “conceit” or “wit”) and conceptismo, for the analysis of the late 20th century Estonian poetry. On that background, defnitions of conceptismo and cultismo (the other main school in Spanish Baroque poetry) are offered in this article, with implications that those definitions may have for understanding different styles and methods of poetry in general, and the characteristics of Talvet’s own poems and poetry translations in particular. To escape diffusion in pure sensuality and verbal indulgence, poetry has to rely on concepts as well as images. Talvet’s interpretations of poetry and poetical thinking are found to be close to conceptismo, or with a considerable amount of conceptuality inherent to them. The juxtaposition of paradoxical ideas from different levels of reality, social and psychic, is seen as the essential poetical method that Talvet refers to as he defines, quoting Yuri Lotman, the structural-semantic code of poetry as being “paradigmatic”. In the final section of the article, Talvet’s 23 book-length published translations are listed, including translations from Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The list does not include numerous translations of single poems or cycles of poetry that have appeared in literary journals, nor his contributions to anthologies of poetry, nor the translations from his native Estonian into a foreign language, such as Spanish or English, in which he has participated. His translations encompass lyrical works as well as fiction and plays. Talvet has translated classical European poetry, such as the sonnets of Petrarch and Quevedo and Provençal poems, as well as the rhymed poems of American poets into Estonian with complete metrical correspondence and full rhymes. However, in the latest decades Talvet has expressed scepticism in the sense and feasibility of attempting to convey the rhyming complexities of the major European literatures into Estonian, a language with a considerably smaller potential for finding full rhymes. Accordingly, his three translations of Spanish Baroque drama (by Calderón and Tirso de Molina) employ a liberal method of versification. In all his versatile activities as a poet, a translator, and a theorist of poetry, Professor Talvet has shown great devotion to developing and cultivating aesthetic values. A lot of his colleagues and students have benefited from his friendly advice. Thinking of his contributions to Estonia’s literary tradition, one may repeat and paraphrase the sentence that he used for the conclusion of his essay on the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu in 1977: “to write (and to translate) poetry is to work for the benefit of the people.”

By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination by William Viestenz

Reviewed by: By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination by William Viestenz Olga Sendra Ferrer Viestenz, William. By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2015. x + 223 pp. Plunging into William Viestenz’s book By the Grace of God is like jumping into the middle of an ongoing conversation. However, it is not a conversation among strangers, but, quite the contrary, among dear friends with whom it is always a pleasure to speak because we are always greeted by new ideas and new possibilities. The interlocutors are so familiar to us that we do not need an introduction: Joan Sales, Juan Goytisolo, Luis Martín Santos, Mercè Rodoreda, Juan Benet, and Salvador Espriu, together with illustrious theorists and thinkers that expand and enhance new approaches to the works of these well-known authors, offering us new readings that situate them in a wider and increasingly productive context. William Viestenz’s original study sets its sights on the ideological construction of Francoism in order to uncover how the sacred/secular binary that came to establish the concept of sovereignty during the dictatorship was employed to define [End Page 483] and shape diverse ideas about what a modern nation in the Iberian Peninsula is and how it operates. In this fashion, contemporary Spain becomes a textual discourse in which to locate forms of power that channel and manipulate political thought through a Catholic mythology that offers collective modes of identification to substitute the lay principles of the Enlightenment. Francoism here serves as a point of departure for a detailed textual analysis of the works of the aforementioned authors, with Viestenz turning to novels as well as poetry as he demonstrates how the dictatorship created an extreme rhetoric of sacred purification and exceptionalism that wound up configuring not just the political state of the past but also the cultural environment of the present in Spain. The author consequently shows how the sanctity of supposedly secular symbolism is generated through the arts and culture, which can function as political agents per se, whether because of how they react to preceding ideologies or how they challenge the alleged truths that are already integrated and accepted in the social milieu of the moment. The two main organizing principles of By the Grace of God lie in this innovative perspective and converge to give us a revitalized conception of Iberian studies. In the first place, the proposition that guides the author’s main narration is the sacred/secular binary, and how the former stretches out toward and subsumes the latter, thus prevailing in the formation of a national secular identity. The second axis of this study refers to the formation of an Iberian canon that challenges the traditional perspective of Hispanic studies, which, while initially appearing to be a question of perspective that only affects the selection of texts chosen for analysis, actually becomes an essential element of Viestenz’s proposal. The structure of the book responds, in turn, to the development of this gray area in which the sacred merges with a secular political imaginary. In this context, Francoism serves the author to mount a theoretical framework that allows him to analyze the chosen works and the contexts in which they develop. To that end, the introduction and the second chapter, “He aquí una plenitud española,” reach back to the nineteenth century and trace the origin and development of the notion of a sacred Spain as a political category and a tool for the discursive construction of the national imagination. To do so, Viestenz resorts to two key concepts, Nietzschean religion and post-secularism, which allow him to elaborate an analytic vocabulary that he will apply to a detailed analysis of his selected literary works and which he will continue to develop and expand as the book advances. For example, the concept of history developed by Hegel serves Viestenz to see how Franco’s discourse fits into liberalism in spite of the fact that during the nineteenth century it was precisely an anti-Hegelian analysis of history that was used to locate the source of public...

Una travessa pel laberint: assaig d’interpretació de «Els jeroglífics i la pedra de Rosetta», de Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas

: This paper studies a unique and amazing work on the Valencian poetry scene of the 1970s: Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas’s Els jeroglífics i la pedra de Rosetta (1976). This unusual example of poetic prose represents a radical change from the realism that characterized her early poems towards the most extreme and cryptic formalism, which defies the ancestral and hieroglyphic silence imposed by the hostility of the environment. In the poem, a space where the author’s own words are combined with those borrowed from other texts, Bakhtin’s dialogism , heteroglossia and polyphony , and Kristeva’s intertextuality can be found. Thus, an extraordinary background of mythological, religious, scientific and historical references, which remind us of Salvador Espriu’s influence, construct the gloomy labyrinth of the poem, an alchemy that transforms the foundations of traditional culture into an expression of rebellion, of anger that underlies the written text, as in a palimpsest. Key words : Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas, Valencian poetry, dialogism , heteroglossia , polyphony , intertextuality .

Eesti eleegia ja teisi luuletusi, 1981–2012 by Jüri Talvet

74 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 Allen Ginsberg as a demon-driven bodhisattva . The poet suggests, “A home is a grave on a hill buried in the heart”; resettling domains of erasure and disappearance , Maninbo: Peace & War single-mindedly protects these human stories from the darkness of forgetting. Dan Disney Sogang University, Seoul Jüri Talvet. Eesti eleegia ja teisi luuletusi, 1981–2012. Tartu, Estonia. Ilmamaa. 2014. isbn 9789985774908 Jüri Talvet’s latest, 375-page collection of poetry, Eesti eleegia ja teisi luuletusi 1981– 2012 (Estonian elegy and other poems) comprises a wide selection of poems written since the early 1980s. The author has used the same title for a slimmer collection that appeared in Estonia in 1997 and, in an English version, from Guernica Editions in Canada in 2008. The eponymous “Estonian Elegy,” included in all three collections , is Talvet’s longest poem that mourns the sinking of the ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea in 1994, taking nearly nine hundred lives. At the same time, the poem is a meditation on the cultural identity of Estonia that may remind one of the somewhat Rilkean diction of Ivar Ivask’s Baltic Elegies (see WLT, Summer 1990, 499). The present book consists of 428 poems, divided into nine sections, approximately corresponding to the contents of Talvet’s earlier collections of poetry. The last section , “Valgusta, arm, veel meid” (Illumine us yet, love) presents previously unpublished poems. The texts vary from strict metrical forms and rhymes of the author’s youth, written in the vein of shy Romantic idealism, to the associative free verse of his mature period. Talvet’s poems synthesize intellectualism and sensualism, conceptuality and eidetic mental impressions, satire and suave contemplation . There are poems that involve language games. Lyrical notes from travels around the world alternate with episodes from family history in his native Estonia that often appear in fragments of dreams, especially as the poet recalls his late parents. The intertextual references include allusions to and internal dialogues with a number of poets whose works Talvet, in the course of forty years, has translated, lectured about, or written scholarly papers on. Most frequently , those influences come from the languages of the Iberian peninsula, like Calderón and Quevedo, Vicente Aleixandre and Federico García Lorca, Fernando Pessoa and Salvador Espriu. Like García Lorca, Talvet is able to combine the highly personal and individual with the suggestive anonymity of a folk song, as in “Viiskümmend aastat tagasi läksime Koidula-kooli” (Fifty years ago, we went to the Koidula School), which blends the author’s childhood memories with the repetitive pattern of motifs from Galician folk poetry and Gil Vicente. Of the Estonian poets, the most significant influence on Talvet’s poetry comes from the terse, intimate style of Juhan Liiv (1864–1913), the realization of whose weighty message Talvet has helped to spread internationally. Lauri Pilter University of Tartu Miscellaneous Nina Bunjevac. Fatherland: A Family History. New York. Liveright / W. W. Norton. 2015. isbn 9781631490316 Why did Nina Bunjevac’s mother, Sally, take her two daughters to Yugoslavia in 1975, abandoning her husband, Peter, and oldest child, Petey, whom Peter refused to let go? What explained her father’s death at forty-one in a Toronto garage while building explosives with two fellow saboteurs in 1977? Winner of the 2015 Douglas Wright Graphic Arts Best Book Award, Fatherland documents this Canadian-born artist ’s quest to fathom her family’s tragically fragmented history. Part 1: Plan B takes place in Nina’s Toronto apartment in 2012, as Nina plies her anxious, repressed mother with questions. Sally reluctantly narrates a tale of growing paranoia as her abusive husband drinks too much and hides his secret life as a Serbian terrorist. Sally’s mother, Momirka, a former partisan loyal to the values she fought for, visits Canada each time Sally gives birth, clashes with Peter’s associates, sees their potential danger, and prods Sally to escape with her children. As tension mounts at home, Sally executes “Plan B,” a fabricated “visit” to her parents in Yugoslavia. The telegram announcing Peter’s violent death follows Momirka’s dream about crows. Presaging dark news, these constitute a leitmotif in part...

Joan Vinyoli i el Premi Ausiàs March de Gandia de 1959

Summary: This study deals with the participation of the poet Joan Vinyoli in the first announcement of the Ausiàs March de Gandia Prize created in 1959, in which he was a finalist for his book of poems For the Secret Staircase (Per l’escala secreta) while Pere Quart was the winner with Paid Holidays (Vacances pagades). The original and two typewritten manuscripts of the unpublished book, preserved in Vinyoli’s archive, are contrasted. Although the work remained unpublished, the poetic materials were later spread and re-used, mainly for the development of other books. Finally, the letters exchanged between members of the prize jury – Joan Fuster, Josep Maria Castellet and Salvador Espriu – are revised and taken into account. [Keywords: Vinyoli; Ausiàs March prize in 1959; For The Secret Staircase]

Literature as a Response to Cultural and Political Repression in Franco’s Catalonia by Jordi Cornellà-Detrell (review)

Reviewed by: Literature as a Response to Cultural and Political Repression in Franco’s Catalonia by Jordi Cornellà-Detrell Geraldine C. Nichols Cornellà-Detrell, Jordi. Literature as a Response to Cultural and Political Repression in Franco’s Catalonia. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2011. Pp. 225. ISBN 978-1-85566-201-8. This narrowly focused, impressively researched study from Jordi Cornellà-Detrell delves into the relationship between literary production and the cultural and political situation of Catalonia in the middle decades of the Franco dictatorship. The author’s approach is original and fruitful, producing a nuanced portrait of the period by analyzing the successive published versions of four novels: Sebastià Juan Arbó’s Tino Costa (1947, 1968), Xavier Benguerel’s El testament (1955, 1963, 1967), Salvador Espriu’s Laia (1932, 1934, 1952, 1968), and Joan Sales’s Incerta glòria (1956, 1969, 1971). Cornellà-Detrell argues that the texts’ modifications reflect the evolving role of literature in shaping mid-century Catalan identity. Literature as a Response to Cultural and Political Repression in Franco’s Catalonia’s seven chapters include one that outlines the literary and linguistic context of the period, and one for each of the novels. Mikhail Bakhtin is the most influential theorist marshaled; his concept of the “polyphonic novel” is particularly germane to Cornellà-Detrell’s argument because such a text “reflects the struggle between the official standardised language promoted by the established power and the multiple social and geographical variants, characterised by their heterogeneity” (15). The number and variety of sources cited by Cornellà-Detrell might have sunk a lesser writer, but he makes expert use of them. The breadth of his preparation in Spanish and Catalan history and culture and the perspicacity of his textual analyses are evident throughout the book. Cornellà-Detrell contends that the four writers of his corpus revised their novels at a moment when they feared that an “excessive emphasis” on standard Catalan—comprehensible given the external threats to the language—risked distancing literary texts from contemporary readers, unschooled in formal Catalan. The spoken language had continued to evolve, keeping pace with the country’s enormous social changes, and these authors understood that the vision of Catalan identity that each of them had embodied in earlier work was now practically unintelligible to younger readers. If their novelistic distillation of what it meant to be Catalan was to contribute to rebuilding the nation, the texts would have to be revised. But literature was considered a “symbolic collective item” (28) in Francoist Catalonia, and tampering with established texts provoked sectors of the intelligentsia. Chapter 3 considers the four versions of Espriu’s Laia, “the fundamental work of his career,” set in the “territory in which his entire oeuvre takes place” (62). Espriu noted that his apprenticeship in Catalan began with Laia, and Cornellà finds that the novel’s forty-year evolution tracks the principal trends and controversies affecting the language in those years. In his judgment, the successive versions of Laia convert what was a Modernist epigone into a work better designed to “reinforce the unity and continuity of Catalan culture” (87). To this end, Espriu suppressed controversial voices, softened gender stereotypes, brought direct speech under the narrator’s control, rendered the chronotope “more distant and remote” (77), eliminated linguistic archaisms, and altered punctuation. Benguerel’s El testament has been read (and critically dismissed) as a Catholic or a bourgeois novel, but Cornellà-Detrell sees it as an allegory of the post-war period, dealing with “the difficulties of communication in a social environment curtailed by repression and lack of freedom” (94). The novel explores silence as protest, the links between language and power under Franco, and the effects of class and social norms on communication. Stylistic modifications diminished mediation by the narrator and increased dialogism, leaving it to the reader to detect “obliquely expressed meaning” (111). Sebastià Arbó’s Tino Costa was first published in 1947, when Catalan texts were rarely authorized, with the provision that it appear simultaneously in Spanish translation. With the latter’s success, Arbó switched languages, becoming a relatively well-known author in postwar Spain. He returned to Catalan in 1965 with a story collection, but “it was already too late...

Fritz Vogelgsang: Salvador Esprius Übersetzer ins Deutsche

Summary: Salvador Espriu’s bilingual (Catalan-German) publication of his complete poetical works by the Zurich publishing house Amman marks a historic moment in the reception of Catalan literature in German-speaking countries. It also represents the apex of the penetration of Espriu in the German literary system, a process which began in 1970. This article looks at this process in detail, focusing on Fritz Vogelgsang, author of the German version of the complete poetical works. A study of the texts is carried out, departing from the translator’s own comments, a comparison with other versions, and the appraisal found in German reviews. [Keywords: Salvador Espriu, Catalan literature, reception in German-speaking countries, Fritz Vogelgsang]

Salvador Espriu: una proposta entre el racionalisme cartesià, la moral pràctica de Sèneca i la mística jueva

Summary: On the basis of a canon of readings recommended by Salvador Espriu himself, the 21st century reader is invited to participate in the poet’s creative process, which suggests an ethical line of social engagement that is mundane, rational and active and that is based on the conquest of the subject’s freedom. [Keywords: Subject, poetry, truth, dialectic, reason, self-analysis, organic-work, kabbala]

Salvador Espriu i la llengua catalana. Sobre <i>Primera història d'Esther</i> i algun altre text

Summary: Building on three texts of Espriu – Primera història d’Esther [The Story of Esther] (1947–48), “Sota la fredor parada d’aquests ulls” [Under the still coolness of these eyes] (1972–76), and El doctor Rip [Doctor Rip] (1931/1972–73] – facts and arguments are put forward concerning the writer’s contribution to the Catalan language. Special attention is drawn to the fact that, even though Espriu remained true to the Fabrian codification, he distanced himself from the version the Noucentisme movement had produced. [Keywords: Salvador Espriu, Catalan language, Fabra codification]

Salvador Espriu a l'Europa eslava: compromís cívic i projecció intercultural

Summary: Early versions of some of Salvador Espriu’s works in Russian, Polish and Czech were published in the 1970s, a period in which the figure of Espriu as a politically engaged poet was still current in Catalonia, due to the patriotic interpretation of La pell de brau [The Bull’s Skin] (1960). In this essay the situation in Catalonia during the last years of Franco’s rule is contrasted with that of the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. By illustrating the attitude of several intellectuals towards the dictatorial power we wish to offer ways of understanding Espriu’s reception in those countries. Thus, we aim to explain the apparent contradiction between two interpretive approaches: on the one hand, an ideology loyal to the government, which saw Espriu as a symbol of the anti-Franco resistance; and a rather anti-Communist attitude on the other, which certain cultivated groups could identify with, as opposed to the SovietMarxist-oriented systems. Moreover, we comment some of the translated works and discuss several strategies for editorial planning. Finally, we propose a short but representative anthology of Espriu’s “civic” poetry in all the three mentioned languages, accompanied by the original poems. [Keywords: Espriu, postwar Catalan poetry, politically engaged literature, Communist regimes, poetry translation, Soviet Union, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia]

La Base Literària i Pictòrica D'Antoni Miró En La Sèrie «Pinteu Pintura» (1980-1990)

Antoni Miró (Alcoi, 1944) has been a crucial painter in the Catalan artistic world for the last few decades. His works are clearly indebted to literature and particularly poetry. It is easy to detect in his works traces of poets and essayists such as Ausiàs March, Joan Valls, Joan Fuster, Salvador Espriu, Vicent Andrés Estellés, and Miquel Martí i Pol. They show the expressive similarities between his works and those by poets". In an ideological sense, we have to highlight the big influence of Joan Fuster in the painter's intellectual education. Thus, we can speak about certain osmosis between the writers whom the painter is interested in and the ones he has a personal relationship with. Within this creative process it's especially interesting to deal with the task Antoni Miró carried out in the pictorial collection «Pinteu Pintura» (1980-1990), a group of works that are the expression of a same purpose: the use of themes and images from classic painters, such as Velázquez or Goya, or modern ones, such as Dalí or Miró, among others. The objective of this article is to analyze these relations between painting and literature.

‘Cemetery at Sinera’ by Salvador Espriu

‘Cemetery at Sinera’ by Salvador Espriu

Anagnôrisis , Political Recognition , and Justice in Salvador Espriu's Antígona

Salvador Espriu's Antigona (1969) is an auto-reflexive tragic drama in which the classical concept of anagnorisis mirrors a dynamics of political recognition outside the play; that is, the contexts of the Spanish Civil War and the postwar periods. The correlation between anagnorisis and political recognition places into question the polis in the Greek tragedy and the State in the historical contexts it mirrors. In exploring the ways in which, in this Catalan Antigone, political recognition is tied to the (im)possibility of justice, as (mis)recognition, I consider (1) how anagnorisis as a form of recognition manifests itself in Espriu's Antigona; (2) how different forms of silence permeate the text: the imposed silence on the citizens of Thebes, as well as the silence that is related with distance and detachment, both of which render impossible an ethical and epistemological position associated with justice as a form of political recognition outside the rule of law; (3) the ways Antigone not only is the be...

The Painful Gift: Critical Phases in the Poetry of Machado, Lorca, and Espriu

More than in earlier periods, twentieth-century poets have regarded the subject of poetry and the role of the poet as material appropriate for the poem itself rather than for merely theorizing about poetry. This essay explores how such a metapoetic preoccupation is manifested in the work of three poets who, in differing ways, illustrate Wallace Stevens' observation that 'the interest of the poem is not in its meaning but in [.] the achieving of an individual reality'. In the case of Antonio Machado the achievement at crisis point takes the form of emotional evolution and resolution; with Federico García Lorca, it is a matter of poetic identity and maturity; for Salvador Espriu it is the engagement with history and the political moment.