VICENT ANDRÉS ESTELLÉS: BORN FOR STAYING AWAKE

Vicent Andrés Esteller

Today, The Grandma wants to talk about one of her favourite poets: Vicent Andrés Estellés.

Vicent Andrés Estellés (4 September 1924-27 March 1993) was a Valencian poet and journalist. 

He was born in Burjassot, València and is considered one of the main renovators of modern Catalan poetry, with a similar role to that of Ausiàs March or Joan Roís de Corella in earlier periods.

Vicent Andrés Estellés was twelve years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out. During its course, he trained to become both a baker and a goldsmith, and learned to write on a typewriter. The war had a profound impact on his work, in which death is a recurring theme.

More information: UOC

Estellés spent his teenage years in Valencia, where he developed an interest in literature. During that period, he was most influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Pablo Neruda, Paul Éluard, Cesare Pavese, and Walt Whitman, Catalan poets such as Màrius Torres, Jacint Verdaguer, Josep Carner, Carles Riba, Santiago Rusiñol and Joan Salvat-Papasseit, as well as the Valencian poet Ausiàs March and the Balearic poet Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel.

In 1942, at the age of 18, Estellés moved to Madrid to study for a degree in Journalism. Three years later, he left to do his military service in Navarre. At the age of 24, he moved back to Valencia and became a journalist for the newspaper Las Provincias. He befriended Joan Fuster, Xavier Casp and Manuel Sanchis i Guarner, all three of them well-known Valencian writers, and met Isabel, who would later influence his writings as well.

The Grandma meeting Estellés in Burjassot

In 1955 Estellés married Isabel. The couple had a daughter, who died when she was four months old. After the death, which Estellés recalled in Coral romput, death became a recurring theme in his works.

In 1958 he became editor-in-chief of Las Provincias, only to be dismissed for political reasons in 1978, thus being forced into early retirement at the age of 54. This allowed him to devote himself entirely to writing and engaging in a variety of cultural activities, such as art exhibitions. That same year, Estellés was awarded the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes. In 1984 he was awarded the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Valencianes.

Estellés spent a few years in Benimodo, a municipality in the comarca of Ribera Alta, in the Valencian Country. During this period, he combined poetry with prose in his works. He received several awards in the 1990s, including the Premis Octubre.

More information: Visat
 

The works of Vicent Andrés Estellés, one of the most important Catalan-language poets of the 20th century, are diverse and extensive. 

Vicent Andrés Estellés

Estellés also wrote novels, plays, screenplays, as well as his memoirs. It is difficult to categorize his entire work because some works were reworked from books or private notes such as Manuscrits de Burjassot, Cançoner or Mural del País Valencià, from which he only published extracts or the poems he considered most appropriate. 

The three levels of oppression that are evident in his works are the reason why Estellés's aesthetics have been described as irate.

-Personal oppression: He describes a vital situation in which persecution and humiliation are constant. This situation unavoidably requires being assertive and acting consequently. It shows love as a possibility of salvation and redemption.

-Collective oppression: He describes a collective life characterized by economic misery, fear of being socially criticized, and a situation of ignorance devastating the people which he feels he belongs to.

-National oppression: He describes a sense of despair, a particular sensitivity caused by cultural, linguistic, and national abduction. He is sensitive to the Valencian people's fight to dignify their own culture.

 More information: Ajuntament de Godella

Some of his most frequently recurring topics are death, love and eroticism, hunger and political oppression, as well as daily life. Put together, these themes provide a considerable formal and tonal variety.

You will assume the voice of a people
and it will be the voice of your people,
and you will be, forever, people,
and you will suffer, and you will wait,
and you will go through the dust,
and a dust cloud will follow you.

Vicent Andrés Estellés