The great Catalan dialectologist Joan Veny (Campos, 1932), at 93 years old, continues to dedicate a few hours a day to the study of the etymology and dialectal variety of words. He seals his commitment to Catalan by going every week to his office at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans to continue working with the meticulousness and passion with which he created seminal works such as Catalan speech and theLinguistic Atlas of the Catalan DomainThe years have not diminished his enjoyment of language. Therefore, he says that due to his "professional deformation," he can't help but notice this aspect when he reads for pleasure, especially poetry and, much less, fiction. As for poetry, he immediately recommends the book by Sebastià Alzamora Augusta Hall (Proa), which "is a delight." Through two long poems, Alzamora speaks of collective and personal memory: "It speaks of the mother and of Franco's persecution," says Veny. "It's a poem that appears simple, but it reaches you deeply," he declares.

Augusta Hall, the first of the two poems – moving and shocking – contained in the new book of Sebastián Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972), begins with a movie screen projecting the image of a ship moored in the port of Palma. The beam of light takes us on a journey back to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The reader soon learns that this ship, the James I, was converted by the Falangists into a prison for a few weeks in 1936. The cinema where the film is shown had also been, during the war, "a prison for locking up the Reds", known as Can Mir, because it was owned by a Falangist family with that surname.