The delivery man arrives with a package: I receive it at home, but it's only when I open it that I know I'm home. This is because the package contains the new edition of JV Foix's poetic works in two dazzling volumes—one for his verse poetry and the other for his prose poetry—edited by Jordi Cornudella, a keen reader and frequent editor of Foix's work. As a colossal bonus, the same package also contains Don't bother answering meThis book compiles all the correspondence between the poets Salvador Espriu and Joan Vinyoli, as well as between Espriu and Vinyoli's wife, Teresa Sastre. Edited by Natalia Juan and Georgina Torra from the Joan Vinyoli Chair of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Girona, it is a delight to read. The Foix volumes have been published by Edicions 62, and the Espriu and Vinyoli volume by Empúries.
I say I felt at home with these three books not because we're talking about local poets, but because this is our culture. Foix, Espriu, and Vinyoli are three of the poets who populate 20th-century Catalan literature, the century Joan Triadú called the golden age of Catalan letters. JV Foix is one of the fundamental names of Catalan modernism, and today, here and now, reading his poems is dazzling and joyful. It gives the reader the delight of realizing that, in the language we speak, it was possible, a hundred years ago, to construct a form of expression that is still unprecedented and groundbreaking, a kind of writing capable of combining the magnificence of 15th-century Catalan, as written by March, with formal and philosophical audacity. In an interview with Baltasar Porcel in the magazine DestinationFoix reflected on his poetry with lucidity. He said: "My work is beauty. Beauty and joy, delight. And indeed, I agree with you: also freedom. Yes. It is solar poetry, full of light and erotic elements."
Espriu is the civilian poet of The bull's hideBut he is also one of the poets of his time who delved most deeply, and at the same time with the most irony, into the thought of death and the silence of God. Vinyoli is a poet in himself. "I sometimes secrete poetry," he writes in a famous verse, and this is certainly the impression he often conveys, as if poetry were a product of his very being, born from his soul. In these letters, and in those of Teresa Sastre, we see them concerned with each other, both in matters of art and in matters of life, and therefore these texts can be revealing at times, and moving (and also amusing) at others. Both belong to the generation of the Republic, as does Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel, the fleeting poetic star who died at twenty-four, and who became a permanent presence in their lives (especially Espriu's) and in this correspondence.
Read Foix, Espriu and Vinyoli, and also Rosselló-Pòrcel. Whether you're approaching them for the first time or have been reading them all your life, you'll find yourself at home.
