Labyrinths: On the Centennial of Salvador Espriu

Illustration by Josep Pla-Narbona.

The great Catalan writer Salvador Espriu—and he was a very, very great writer—was born one hundred years ago today, in Santa Coloma de Farners, a town some one hundred kilometers northeast of Barcelona. He moved as a child further south to seaside Arenys de Mar and later even further south to Barcelona. His imagination was inherently Catalan in its most expansive sense, mar i muntanya, the sea and the mountains, weaving in and out of his settings and his sense of character and fate: the sea bringing the atmospherics of maritime communities to his work, as well as the classical and Egyptian via the Mediterranean, and the mountains cradling all of the intimacy, hermetic folklore, and internecine conflict by which towns hemmed in by ecology are often marked. He wrote fiction, plays, and was perhaps best known for his poetry. His skill set was gigantic. He had a project: his imagined, mythical homeland Sinera appears in much of his work (Sinera being a phonetic rendering of his childhood home of Arenys written backwards); characters from his poems and plays would appear in his fiction, without set-up, warning, or explication; if you read all of his work together, you realize that he has created within it, for it, a thriving community with its own inner logic, inner laws, and even physical laws (his work at times paws at the fantastical and the absurd like a cat determined to grab a candle’s flame); he invented other names for Spain, Catalunya, Barcelona as though those names would not do; and, despite what it would mean for his career as a writer, he wrote almost exclusively in Catalan.

When I was asked to translate Espriu’s collection of short stories, Ariadna al laberint grotesc, I was happy to do so. For the record, I’m not someone who can kind of read Catalan or who approximates from Spanish: I speak Catalan at home and when we’re back home in Barcelona that’s all I speak and write and read. I write this not to brag but to admit that I didn’t think that Espriu’s prose could get the best of me. But the beautiful and bizarre Adriadna al laberint grotesc (published last year as Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth by Dalkey Archive) provided challenges that provoked in me at the same time great melancholy and great joy. After I was done, fortunately, joy was what remained. Read More »