Estellés and Espriu: Pillars of Catalan Literature
Vicent Andrés Estellés
Vicent Andrés Estellés emerged in the seventies, becoming one of the most significant Valencian poets since the fifteenth century and a representative voice of the post-war era. His obsessive need to classify reality with words made him a perfect chronicler of the time he lived. Estellés championed a collective civic feeling, presenting himself as a voice for the claims of a people and a language subjected to silence (well captured in Book of Wonders).
His topics (hunger, sex, death) are treated with great detail and rooted in everyday life. When speaking of death, a subject that fascinated him, he depicted a corpse lying on the concrete floor, not as a metaphorical resource, but with stark realism. Love, his lyrical core, manifested itself in a rich range of feelings, from explicitly expressed sexuality to more sophisticated forms of desire.
The poet forged a literary language influenced by the classics, mainly Ausiàs March, and contemporary literature, but he certainly did not hesitate to embed the colloquial language he learned in the garden during his childhood. Names and expressive resources abound.
An incredibly prolific poet, he initially published very sparsely; he corrected and shaped the first books from a corpus he called ‘The Burjassot Manuscripts’. His first published book was City to Ear. The death of his daughter led him to write One Night and First Loneliness. Later, he published Bitter Donzell, a poem that was a finalist for the Cynosure Award.
Intensity, chromaticity, power, and originality make Estellés’s work innovative and deserving of an honored place in our literary scene.
Salvador Espriu
Salvador Espriu was a poet, playwright, and novelist considered one of the innovators of Noucentista Catalan prose. His work, characterized by a mixture of intellectualism and an often caustic descriptivism, represents a singularity. His idiomatic richness, complexity, thematic depth, and ability to describe collective history in transcendent terms must be considered among the most important facts of twentieth-century Catalan literature.
His extensive body of work includes noteworthy books of poems such as The Cemetery of Sinera, The Foot and the Wall, and Bull’s Skin, probably his most famous work, which develops his vision of historical, moral, and social Spain. Throughout his poetry, Espriu developed his own world, identified with ‘Sinera’, which is the name of Arenys de Mar read backwards.
In Bull’s Skin, his most resonant work, Espriu poured reflections on diversity and tolerance, employing old techniques (such as the personal use of symbols and blending satire, elegy, and epic). However, the book acquired the character of a civic discourse due to the climate in Catalan society at the time, as well as its focus on Sefarad (Jewish Spain), which acted as a catalyst for a renewed, contemporary, and even international perspective.
In 1971, he published a book of poems entitled Easter, which in 1972 won the Critics’ Prize for poetry in Spanish, despite being a work written in Catalan.
The great popularity gained when his poems were set to music by Raimon helped ensure his work continued to be read until the poet’s death on February 22, 1985, at age 72.