Rain Mountain Press

The Cemetery, The Hours, & Mrs. Death

The Cemetery, The Hours, & Mrs. Death
by Salvador Espriu, translated by Antonio Cortijo Ocaña and Andrew Kaufman

Salvador Espriu was one the greatest poets of modern Europe. His work is comparable in stature to that of Dylan Thomas or T. S. Eliot, or Montale or Pasternak.

—Claude Roy, Fénéon Prize for Poetry, The Prix Valery Larbaud, and The Goncourd Prize for Poetry

Espriu's voice as rendered here is really the essence of poetry for me: quiet music, indelible images, a subtle yet profoundly affecting emotional register. I will be the first in line to order a copy when it is available.

—Michael Centore, Editor, Today's American Catholic

This work is a tour-de-force. The translators have excelled in their carefully-crafted renditions. Espriu's poetry comes alive in English. The translations are accurate while providing English readers with a text that reads like poetry. This book will be enjoyed by many English readers in the years to come.

—Prof. Vicent Martines Peres, Institute of Catalan Studies, University of Alicante

I can only underscore the translators' enormous success in incorporating into English the nuances of Espriu's expression. Their work is of a superb quality.

—Dr. Eloi Grasset Morell, Spanish Department, University of California at Santa Barbara

Read an excerpt from The Cemetery, The Hours, & Mrs. Death

COMING SOON

Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) published nine books of poetry, had three plays produced, and while in his late teens and early twenties had six novels published before giving up fiction to concentrate on poetry. Nearly forty years after his death he continues to be regarded as Catalonia’s de facto national poet. During his lifetime he won every major literary prize available to Catalan poets. Described by Harold Bloom as “an extraordinary poet by any international standard” and “deserving of a Nobel prize,” Espriu’s poetry is all but unavailable in English and unknown this side of Catalonia and Spain due largely to the obscurity of the Catalan in which he wrote. The cumulative impact of the childhood deaths of a sister and brother and his own near death from a bronchial illness that required three years of bed rest is reflected in many of his poems. He devoted the time spent convalescing to an intensive reading program focused on ancient Greek, Latin, Hebraic, and Egyptian literature that likewise had a major influence on his work. When well enough he traveled extensively in Italy, Greece, Egypt, and what was then Palestine. Following the death of his father Espriu spent two dispiriting decades laboring in a notary (a type of law practice) to support his mother and surviving siblings. He lived with a sister his entire adult life which was uneventful except for the succession of literary prizes he won, the death of his close friend and mentor, the symbolist poet Barteneu Rossello-Porcel, when both were in their mid twenties, and the impact of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.

Antonio Cortijo Ocaña is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is the founding Director of the Center for Catalan Studies and the founding editor of the journal eHumanista (www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu). He has written over 50 books including six volumes of translations, plus critical editions of texts in Catalan, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, and monographs on Iberian Peninsula and colonial Latin-American culture, history, religion, and literature. He received the 2001 Diputación de Sevilla award for his Theory of History and Political Theory in 16th-century Spain; the 2011 Scripta Humanistica award for his Catalan Humanism (together with J. Butinyà); and the 2017 Francesco Saverio Nitti award for his translation of Ramon Llull´s A Contemporary Life (Vita coaetanea) from Latin into Spanish and English.

Andrew Kaufman is the author of Earth’s Ends, winner of the Pearl Poetry Award; The Cinnamon Bay Sonnets, winner of the Center for Book Arts Book Award; Both Sides of the Niger (Spuyten Duyvil Press); the Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets (Rain Mountain Press); and The Rwanda Poems: Voices and Visions.

SITE MAINTAINED BY JONATHAN PENTON