Espriu, Salvador

b. 1913, Santa Coloma de Farners (Gerona); d. 1985, Barcelona

   Writer

   Although born in a village in the province of Gerona, Espriu will always be associated with Arenys de Mar, a small fishing town on the Costa Brava where he spent his boyhood summers, and which figures as Sinera in much of his work. By his mid-twenties he had published several works of prose fiction, notably the novels El doctor Rip (Dr Rip) (1931) and Laia (1932). At the end of the Civil War, Espriu turned to drama with his Antígona (Antigone) (written 1939, published 1955), a reconciliatory vision of a war between brothers. Although he had also written poetry before the end of the Civil War, it was only with Cementiri de Sinera (Sinera Cemetery) (1944–5) that he opted decisively for poetry. Its clandestine publication in 1946 at a time when publishing in Catalan was prohibited ushered in a period of predominantly poetic creativity. The cycles of the 1940s and 1950s are taut and integrated works, and in each the struggle for identity and recovery is enacted. The opening of the cycle is invariably bleak and negative: the silences and the lack of identity in Cementiri de Sinera, the image of the waters of the abyss confronting the self in Les hores (The Hours) (1951), the weary puppets and the cacophonous music in Mrs Death (1952), the dark prison cell of both El caminant i el mur (The Wanderer and the Wall) (1955) and Final del laberint (End of the Labyrinth) (1955). But each time there is a sense of gain, whether in individual identity or, increasingly, in a collective awareness or the articulation of a collective voice. In Cementiri de Sinera, for example, individual observation leads to social observances, and the political or civic concerns implicit in the earlier collections culminate in La pell de brau (The Bull-Hide) (1960). This collection contains a clear rebuke to Franco and marks the involvement of Espriu with the Catalan nationalist and democratic aspirations of the 1960s, seen in the adoption of his poetry by the singers of the Nova Cançó, and in his arrest after participating in the student sit-in at the Monastery of Sarrià in 1966. In the 1960s, too, Espriu's works were adapted for dramatic presentation: La pell de brau was performed at the Mataró Glassworks, while a more ambitious project involved the reworking of several texts into the Ronda de Mort a Sinera (Patrol of Death in Sinera). A poet of impressive lyrical restraint and ethical sobriety, Espriu has been justly described by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán as one of the symbols of Catalan cultural and moral resistance to Francoism.

   Further reading

   - Bogin, M. (1988) Selected Poems of Salvador Espriu, New York and London: W.W.Norton (a small selection of Espriu's poetry with facing translation and a short but informative introduction).

   - Castellet, J.M. (1971) Iniciación a la poesía de Salvador Espriu, Madrid: Taurus (the best overview of Espriu's poetry).

   - Walters, D.G. (1994) " “Sense cap nom ni símbol”: recovery and identity in Salvador Espriu's Cementiri de Sinera", Modern Language Review 89, 4: 889–901 (a detailed study of Espriu's first cycle drawing attention to its integral and dynamic character).

   D. GARETH WALTERS