Raimon: "Espriu and I love each other very much."

Barcelona"Of the Catalan classics, the most translated is Mercè Rodoreda, then comes Ramon Llull, and the third is Salvador Espriu. It has had and still has a great influence in many places around the world," commented the poet and university professor Jaume Subirana shortly before the round table dedicated to the author of The bull's skin at the University of Barcelona (UB) as part of the third Salvador Espriu International Symposium, held at the UB, Pompeu Fabra University, and the Autonomous University. Participating were poet and editor Ramon Balasch and two singer-songwriters, Raimon and Pau Alabajos, moderated by one of the driving forces behind the academic event, Professor Maria Moreno i Domènech.

"At the end of the seventies I became Espriu's secretary. He would give me all the essays he had been writing in envelopes. After a long time, they became the posthumous book Ocnos and the stopped scare (2013)", explained Balasch, who founded in the seventies Mall Books. "Sinera is not Arenys de Mar: I'm not the one saying this, Espriu himself is, but no one has paid attention to him," he commented. "Sinera is, in reality, the Barcelona of the ashes. It remains the city of bombs that Joan Maragall had christened years before." Balasch recalled that one of the things that bothered Espriu most was the "trivialization" of his literature, insistently comparing Sinera with Arenys. He also praised a "study of goldsmithing" written by Rosa M. Delor, Kabbalah and Espriu: A Poetics of Light (2013), which culminated the essayist and critic's extensive dedication to studying the connection between Espriu's poetry and the hermetic mystical tradition of Judaism.

A book that has moved generations

"I read a lot of Espriu when I was in Valencia, in the early sixties. It was possibly Joan Fuster who recommended him to me," Raimon said. "When I had a strong understanding of his work, I set music to Songs from the Wheel of Time [1967], I was given Espriu's phone number and I spoke to him. The first thing he said to me was: "Is this Mr. Raimon? I admire you deeply." We got off to a very good start." From then on, the two forged a very deep friendship. The author and friend throughout his career, wrote the prologue to the French translation of The bull's skin, a book that since its appearance in 1960 has not ceased to "excite generations, and continues to do so."

In 2013, the year of the centenary of the birth of Salvador Espriu, Pau Alabajos He set to music for the first time a poem by Espriu, number 46 of The bull's skin. "Sometimes it is necessary and obligatory / for a man to die for a people, / but an entire people should never die / for a single man: / always remember this, Sepharad," the poem begins. "Given the political situation we were experiencing at the time, it seemed like a good way to connect the past and the present," Alabajos said. "There are connecting links between Franco's regime and the ghosts and monsters of fascism today," he added. In one of his most recent projects, Verses in Vietnamese (Rebel, 2025), Alabajos has jointly composed music with Cesk Freixas poem 38 of the book, from which he has quoted a fragment: "We will try to raise in the sand / the dangerous palace of our dreams." He has related it to the independence process that culminated in the referendum of October 1, 2017. "Espriu was never an independence supporter: he was always very careful with politics, because he had the memory of the war very present, but at the same time he allowed himself to be used by all kinds of causes of the time, socialist and communist, which have been lived The bull's skin"Balasch said.