“Salvador Espriu Castelló, writer, single, sixty years old, a native of Santa Coloma de Farners [...]. He declares that he in no way wishes to be buried in the cemetery of Arenys de Mar. He further declares his express wish that his body be cremated, if the laws permit”. These are verbatim words, handwritten by Salvador Espriu in what is a document of last wishes, a draft of a will, written at some point between the summer of 1973 and that of 1974 – he was born on July 10, 1913 –, drafted in Spanish – the law did not provide for any other option – and addressed to his great friend and lawyer Josep Ferrer i Rius.

I read about a commotion Don't bother answering me (Empúries, 2026), the book that collects the letters that were sent Salvador Espriu and Joan VinyoliThey are not particularly poetic, political, or socially contextual letters. They are personal lettersThe messages exchanged between two friends to celebrate life's triumphs and lament its sorrows and disappointments. In total, they contain forty letters from Espriu to Vinyoli, eight from Espriu to Teresa Sastre (Vinyoli's wife), and only seven from Vinyoli to Espriu.

Fifteen years before Franco's death, in 1960, Salvador Espriu published The bull's hide, a poem in which the author sets aside meditations on death and the sarcasm of God and proposes one on postwar Spain and Catalonia. It has often been read as a pragmatic proposal: given that victors and vanquished were forced to coexist, the best course of action was to strive for a dignified reconciliation. As Espriu himself has the character of the Almighty say, in Esther's First Story"Let a reciprocal offering of forgiveness and tolerance be given without wavering." It was about looking ahead, although this in no way meant surrendering to oblivion and forgetfulness. In one of the fragments of The bull's hideIn poem XLVI, the poet puts it this way: "Sometimes it is necessary and unavoidable / that a man die for a people, / but a whole people should never die / for a single man: / always remember this, Sepharad." To Sepharad (the Sephardic name Espriu uses to refer to Spain, but not to the bloodthirsty Francoist Spain, but to the truncated Republican Spain in which he was young) he addresses a plea: "Make the bridges of dialogue safe / and try to understand and love / the reasons and the diverse voices of your children." An affirmation of diversity, we would say now, that connects with another fundamental poem on the same subject,Ode in Spain by Joan Maragall. Only in this way, Espriu concludes, will a dignified future be possible: "May the rain fall little by little on the sown fields / and the air pass like an outstretched hand / soft and very benign over the wide fields. / May Sepharad live eternally / in order and in peace, in work, / in hardship."

"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.