This book —which takes its title from a poem by Joan Vinyoli, a friend of Feliu Formosa— discreetly, yet profoundly, celebrates life. Although it reflects on death and absence, on loss and pain, life weighs more heavily. The poet manages the emotion with which he presents each of the pretexts used to elucidate the theme very well. “Love, desire and dream”, begins poem XXIV, which deals with a love affair. At ninety years old, existence becomes more peremptory than ever, but, as many verses demonstrate, also fully in love. “I never know if I say everything”: one never finishes saying everything, but here Formosa says many things (and, when he doesn't, he suggests them). Memories, desires, impressions. And he inventories many ideas. A very suggestive one is that “to live is to translate / and to translate is to live”.

It must be said that if the president of the Generalitat (Catalan government), Salvador Illa, wanted to talk with a writer for Sant Jordi, he was naturally free to do so with Javier Cercas, but it's a shame because he thus missed the opportunity to chat with Feliu Formosa. There was also a looming birthday that could have served as a pretext, since Formosa just turned ninety last September, in excellent physical and mental health. Isla could have talked with Formosa. about the nursing homes where he has lived –which he does with an impressive irony and delicacy–, and also about the new and magnificent books with which he has celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Six books, no less, half a dozen splendid ones, three of his own creations and three translations: The Yellow Notebook (dazzled and dazzling poems in verse and prose, in Edicions 96), Approximations (a book of fragments, notes and illuminations, somewhat in the style of As is by Paul Valéry, in Leonardo Muntaner Editor) and Complete newspapers (a volume that brings together the post-1979 dietary work, published by Quid Pro Quo Edicions). This is with regard to his own books. In translations, Formosa has recently given us his versions of the Roman Elegies by Goethe (Adesiara), from the texts of Paul Klee collected in See and know (LaBreu) and the poems of German War Primer and Other Poems, by her beloved Bertold Brecht (Tripod). All six are books with which you will give and give yourself splendid and lasting gifts this day.