Why has the poetry of Segimon Serrallonga lived hidden for so long?

The first thing that comes to my mind after reading this eloquent 800-page volume is a question: how is it that the lyrical work of Segimon Serrallonga (Torelló, 1930 - Badalona, 2002) has lived hidden for so long? We knew, of course, some of his accomplishments, but the majority of these poems remained to be discovered. The impression that the work now produces on us is staggering, although it is true that it contains pieces of extremely high lyricism and others of intention –though not of writing– that are rather more rugged.

Francesc Codina summarizes, in this way, the spirit of the verse of the author from Torelló: “A combination of high classical and modern culture, of a Christian-based morality and Marxist social critique, of political commitment and a dissident position before social realism” (the noted dissidence could have influenced, quite plausibly, the poet's certain marginalization of the poet). Jaume Coll Mariné, who has been in charge of the edition of the volume –a profusely annotated edition, which could have been called critical without incurring error or imprecision–, recalls the close connection of Serrallonga with that thriving Vigatà nucleus that was born with the anthology Estudiants de Vic, 1951, which, besides him, brought together the poets Josep Maria Riubrogent, Josep Esteve, Josep Junyent, Josep Grau, Antoni Pous and Ramon Cotrina. In the years to come, the appearance of the magazine Reduccions would add to that founding group, intellectually so ambitious, the no less eminent names of Miquel Martí i Pol, Jordi Sarrate, Lluís Solà and Ricard Torrents.

Therefore, it is the first time that, thanks to the painstaking and scrupulous work of Coll Mariné, we can read the bulk of Serrallonga’s poetic work, in an important book –I dare to predict that it will be one of the most relevant poetic titles to have seen the light of day in the current year– that does not cease to be artificial, insofar as it collects a good bundle of rigorously unpublished poems. So that, read in its chronological development, the author’s poetry acquires, even, much more value. And it is now that we can, in the end, enjoy it and evaluate it.A unique author

Serrallonga is a poet who does not resemble, to say the least, any Catalan lyricist of the last century. He comes from the Ribian lineage, but his diction is very different from the master's. Perhaps we could find common interests with the poetry of Lluís Solà, but they seem to me to be two distinct voices. More sporadically, we could establish links with Joan Vinyoli or Màrius Sampere, for example. In some cases, he makes me think of the Spaniard Antonio Gamoneda: due to the presence that, in the work of both, the subject of light holds. From the very beginning—the oldest verses were written in his twenties—the consistent philosophical gaze imposes itself on everything he writes. Man—asserts Serrallonga— “has a heart of tender, suffering flower” and “death stalks his every step, and evil.” The tender, suffering flower is the protagonist of many of the compiled verses: “Like a crime, love ploughs through our insides,” he argues here; “I think of love and I tremble,” he defends there.

Rilke considered that beauty was the beginning of the terrible, and Serrallonga—in two verses of different meaning, yet, ultimately, convergent with the Czech’s—maintains that “everything is so beautiful / that it is impossible.” However, in two other much more reassuring verses, he emphasizes yet that “we mortals are all servants / of stale beauties.” And, in others, he concludes that “there is no beauty / that is as mortal / as the tender child.” His is a verse of conceptual root, which, if it does not have the word at hand, creates it: “un-loving conceivable truth”, “indecipherable light”, “they make me suffer like un-suffer”; but it is also a verse that is always singable, with a very powerful lyrical sense: “At the bottom of the forest, far from me, / the sacred bark burns.” Poetry was, for the author, a pledge of truth (of the search for truth, in fact), as he asserts in the following motto: “Believe nothing / that does not enter in verse.”

In Eixarms (1974), Serrallonga uses irony. He has also written poetry of political denunciation (read the invaluable La pàtria, with subtle darts at politicians by name). But, deep down, what carries weight is his profoundly human poetry, of deep reflection on our essence, on our contingency: “The body, for him, asks for little: / to drink, to eat, to sleep... and in a start / to become an instrument to grasp the fire / that does not fit in its space”. Fire, above all: therein lies the heart of the Promethean verse of Segimon Serrallonga. Because, he still asserts, “he who thinks the deepest / loves the most living”. Poetic reality, in short.