Salvador Espriu: Life, Works, and Literary Legacy

Posted on Oct 12, 2024 in Latin

Salvador Espriu: National Poet of Catalonia

Biography

  • Born in Santa Coloma de Farners, 1913.
  • Family relocated to Barcelona; father worked as a notary.
  • Spent extended periods in Arenys de Mar, a coastal town.
  • A sickly child, he spent much time reading.
  • 1933: A Mediterranean cruise significantly impacted his life and work.
  • 1935-1936: Studied Law and Ancient History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
  • Experienced the hardship of the Spanish Civil War; mobilized as a war auditor, lost his friend Bartolomé Rosselló-Pòrcel, and his father died.
  • The war had a profound influence on his writing.
  • Unable to complete his studies in Classics and Egyptology.
  • Assumed family financial responsibilities after his father’s death in 1939, abandoning his writing career.
  • Lived in a self-imposed “internal exile.”
  • Worked as a notary’s assistant.
  • Died in Barcelona in 1985; buried in Arenys de Mar.

Literary Style and Characteristics

  • Early literary vocation: Israel at age 16.
  • Known for poetry, but also wrote plays and narrative works.
  • Initially focused on prose (1929-1937).

Narrative Prose

  • Developed before the Civil War.
  • Style: A blend of satire and refined lyricism.
  • Consistently precise and polished.
Narrative Works
  • Israel (1929) (in Spanish): Collection of biblical scenes.
  • Storybook: Dr. Rip (1931), Aspects (1934), The Grotesque Labyrinth of Ariadne (1935).
  • Novels: Laia (1932), Mirage in Citerea (1935), Phaedra (1936), and Letizia (1937).

Post-War Literature

  • The war and post-war period deeply affected him: “I have not shed blood, I destroyed the world.” This sentiment underlies his work.
  • Used mythology to express his obsessions:
  • Biblical (Old Testament, Jewish people), Egyptian (Book of the Dead), and Greek.
  • Sinera (Arenys): The Garden of Five Trees.

Poetry

Elegiac Lyrical Facet

  • Themes of memory and meditation on death.
  • Nostalgia for a lost world, filled with love and tenderness.
  • Pessimistic view of humanity; God is portrayed as cruel, blind, a puppeteer manipulating human fate.

Civil Aspect

  • Assertive and discontent.
  • Recovery of the Catalan language: Aim of “saving the words.”
  • Themes of dialogue, solidarity, forgiveness, and peace for Catalonia.

Poetry Collections

First Stage
  • Cemetery of Sinera (1946)
  • The Songs of Ariadne (1949)
  • The Hours (1952)
  • Mrs. Death (1952)
  • The Walk and the Wall (1954)
  • Final Labyrinth (1955)
Second Stage
  • La pell de brau (1960): This work brought him fame in the political context of the 1960s. Set to music by Raimon.

Theater

  • Used as a distraction from the grim reality.
  • Translation of Villalonga’s Phaedra (1955).
  • Works related to the war:
  • Antigone (1939)
  • First Story of Esther (1948)
  • Another Phaedra, if you Please (1977)

Cemetery of Sinera (Excerpt)

My eyes no longer know
but look on
Lost and alone. How I am
old carts creaking
lanes Novareba!
In my memory come
evening smells of the sea
for cloudless summers. Endures
my fingers in the pink
I picked. And on my lips
Wind, fire, words
turned to dust.

Salvador Espriu, Poem IV

La pell de brau (Excerpt)

Sometimes it is necessary and forced
that one man die for a people,
but never an entire people must die
for a single man:
Always remember this, Cambria.
Be sure to be the bridges of dialogue
And try to understand and love
reasons and the speech of your children.
Let the rain fall slowly in the sown
the air like an outstretched hand
soft, gentle on the broad fields.
To live forever Cambria
in the order and peace at work
in hard and deserved
freedom.

Salvador Espriu, Poem XLVI

The Songs of Ariadne (Excerpt)

HOME OF THE TEMPLE CANTICLE

Now say: “The broom blooms, around the fields are red poppies. With new sickle start to reap the ripened wheat, and with it the weeds.” Ah, young lips opened after dark, if you knew how dawn we took, how long to wait a rising light in the darkness! But we have lived to save your words, sure to return the name of everything, so along the straight path access to mastery of the earth. We looked beyond the desert, Descended to the bottom of our dream. Tanker become dry peaks scaled by steps of slow hours. Now say: “We hear voices wind of the sea spikes.” Now say: “We shall faithful forever serving this country.”