SALVADOR ESPRIU & SINERA: A MEDITATION ON DEATH

Salvador Espriu

The Grandma is in Milan, Lombardy. Tomorrow, she's going to start a new travel on The Orient Express. She has been preparing her suitcase carefully. She  wants to take profit of this travel, hours and hours of railway, and she has decided to take two books. One of them, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which she is sharing with her families on line, and Salvador Espriu's Complete Works, her favourite writer.

She wants to explain you a little about @Salvador_Espriu this fascinating man who created some of the most beautiful poems ever written and invented an own world: Sinera.

     

Now say: "The broom tree blooms,
    everywhere the fields are red with poppies.
    With new scythes we'll thresh
    the ripened wheat and weeds."

Salvador Espriu i Castelló (1913-1985) was a Catalan poet who  was born in Santa Coloma de Farners, El Baix Empordà, Girona. He was the son of an attorney. He spent his childhood between his home town, Barcelona, and Arenys de Mar, a village on the Maresme coast.

At the age of sixteen, he published his first book, Israel, written in Spanish. In 1930 he entered the University of Barcelona, where he studied law and ancient history. While traveling (1933) to Egypt, Greece and Palestine, he became acquainted with the countries that originated the great classical myths, and which would be so influential in his work.

Ah, young lips parting after dark,
    if you only knew how dawn
    delayed us, how long we had to wait
    for light to rise in the gloom!

During the Spanish civil war he was mobilised and served in military accounting.

Translated into several languages, Espriu's work has obtained international recognition, most notably the Montaigne prize (1971). He was also given the Award of Honour of Catalan Letters (1972), the Ignasi Iglesias prize (1980), the City of Barcelona Prize (1982) and the Gold Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1982). He was awarded honorary doctor's degrees by the universities of Toulouse and Barcelona.

He died in Barcelona in 1985, and was buried in the Arenys de Mar cemetery, which gives name to his poem Cementiri de Sinera.

Cemetery of Arenys de Mar, El Maresme

In 1931 he published El doctor Rip, and the following year, Laia, novels that move away from the then-fashionable theoretical formulas of the aesthetics of the Catalan Noucentisme movement. The publication of Aspectes (1934), Ariadna al laberint grotesc (1935) and Miratge a Citera (1935), established him as the most original narrator of his generation. 

During the Civil War, he published Letizia i altres proses. In 1939, in occupied Barcelona and before the military conflict ended, he wrote a play, Antígona on the subject of fratricidal war and compassion for the losers.

But we have lived to save your words, 

to return you the name of every thing,
so that you'd stay on the straight path

that leads to the mastery of earth. 

Espriu, who had begun to write poetry before the war, did not publish his first volume of poems until 1946: Cementiri de Sinera, an elegy with a great formal sobriety. With this book and with the play Primera història d'Esther linguistically creative and original, began his post-war popularity, which grew as the rest of his work, essentially poetical, was published.

Salvador Espriu's poem in The Sagrada Família

In Les cançons d'Ariadna (1949) he collected a series of poems from various periods that contrasted satire and distortion with elegy and lyricism and in which the mythological subjects can be found that were to appear in subsequent works.

The four books of poems that followed, Les hores and Mrs. Death (1952), El caminant i el mur (1954) and Final del laberint (1955), compose, together with Cementiri de Sinera, a specific formal unity, on the one hand, given the symmetrical number of poems included in each volume and, on the other, the strict development of a very complex spiritual process that culminates in a mystical experience in the last book of the cycle.

We looked beyond the desert,

 plumbed the depth of our dreams,
turned dry cisterns into peaks
scaled by the long steps of time.

The tremendous public success of La pell de brau (1960) signified the popular recognition of Espriu: the author posed the historical drama of Sepharad (poet's nickname for Spain after the Jewish usage) in poems with a high spiritual, moral and political resonance.

Llibre de Sinera (1963), one of his most hermetic books, ties in with subjects from the two previous works and again circumscribes the civil ambit of his poetry to the homeland mythicized in Sinera, a word phonetically formed by spelling backwards Arenys. In Setmana Santa (1971), through the images of the ritual procession, the author presents the myth of the Catholic Passion from a metaphysical perspective.

Download A walk across Sinera: The main sceneries of Salvador Espriu

The author generically described his work as a meditation on death, but this term is too restrictive to comprehend its complexity and cultural point of view. Actually, Espriu proposes to assume the literary tradition of humanity in a personal re-creation situated in a specific geographical and historical context, Catalonia after the Spanish civil war defeat, of which he sings its failings and hope.

Now say: "We hear the voices 

of the wind on the high sea of crested grain." 

Now say: "We shall be ever faithful 

to the people of this land." 

Perhaps the most important virtue and originality of Espriu has been his capacity to reconcile, in the same unitary work, the spiritual problems of man, with metaphysical resonances, with his fate as a member of a group subjected to social and political tensions, while posing the great questions of justice and liberty.

Some fragments of Salvador Espriu's poem, La pell de brau, are sculpted in the main doors of Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Família in Barcelona.

Download Salvador Espriu. Haikus. Mytology. Kabbalah. Metaphisic.

The Grandma loves Espriu's works and understands how important is religion for him. In Judaism, Salvador Espriu found something no other religion had done: the solving of the problem about myth and history (Qabbalah). Salvador Espriu is one of the best writers has ever existed. Their works are bright pearls in the middle of a society who lived closed and prisoned under the dark power of a cruel dictatorship. Espriu means dignity and resistance and he offers to his population a hopeful future based on the persistance reached by literature creating an hermetic, mythological and evasive world, Sinera, which if you read from the right to the left you discover that it's Arenis, then Arenys de Mar.

Escolta, Sepharad: els homes no poden ser
si no són lliures.
Que sàpiga Sepharad que no podrem mai ser
si no som lliures.
I cridi la veu de tot el poble: "Amén."

Salvador Espriu, La pell de brau