Miquel Costa i Llobera in the Holy Land

The title, Visions de la Palestina. Notes d’un pelegrinatge, by Miquel Costa i Llobera (Pollença, 1854-Palma, 1922), suggests a narrative travel diary written in prose, but it is a collection of autonomous poems linked by theme (different biblical episodes from the Old and New Testaments, the history of the Jewish people), the setting (the landscapes, the arid and venerable light and atmosphere of the Middle East) and the formal choice (the Hebrew verse), a very long Hebrew verse, which various scholars have mistakenly considered prose. The inspiration for the book was a cruise through the Mediterranean that Costa took in 1907, which took him to Rome, Greece, the Holy Land, and Egypt.Although Visions de la Palestina is not as well-known or central as Costa's two canonical titles, Poesies (1885, 1907) and Horacianes (1906), it is a valuable and important work, in which the poet demonstrates his majestic command of the language and his versatile formal virtuosity. The agile magnificence and imposing grace with which Costa, like Verdaguer, poeticizes matters both human and divine, the sacred and the profane, underscores his condition as a highly cultured and inspired priest-poet. It is for all these reasons that it is very good news that now, fifty-five years after it was last reissued as an independent book, the Lleonard Muntaner publishing house has produced a new edition, complete and impeccable, with paratexts (preface, notes, letters) of all kinds and origins. The critical edition, edited by Carles Cabrera Villalonga, is headed by a preliminary study by Gabriel de la S. T. Sampol which is so good that it not only exhaustively explains and contextualizes the work it presents but even functions as a partial but detailed and in-depth introduction to the overall costalloberiana work.Sampol, poet and translator, leaves nothing aside. He explains the circumstances of the work's writing; he reasons the why of the literary genre –lyrical poetry, not diariestism– and the why of the title –they are literal visions and also a vision of spiritual transport–; he points out the crucial fact that, with this book, Costa completed his cultivation of “the three formal possibilities” that he had mentioned a few years earlier in a conference at the Ateneu Barcelonès (classical, modern poetry and Hebrew versicle); he lists the main thematic axes of the poems (landscape, sentiment, spirituality and metaliterature); he unravels the rhetorical architecture and the most common rhetorical resources of the Hebrew versicle and Costa's adaptation of it, and indicates the scarce following that Catalan poetry has made of it later... What I said before: a very complete preliminary study. Meticulous and substantial erudition.It is evident, in any case, that most of the poems in Visions de la Palestina do not reach the category of Costa's best poetry. There is more deliberation and painstaking craft here than inspiration and grace, the rhythm flows with a somewhat affected and hesitant musicality, and the profusion of geographical and biblical references becomes burdensome. There are also, however, powerful poems, such as Llatzèria and Jerusalem, where we find, among others, these grandiloquent and inflamed verses: “Oh city of glory and terror!, your fate can only be explained by Calvary: the true Ark of your sanctification is this Sepulchre where Death was conquered”. A little-known but important book by one of the fathers of modern Catalan poetry.