Considering how much poetry the great Catalan writer Salvador Espriu wrote, a representative selection is a tall order for any translator. Louis Rodrigues has limited his choice to a hundred poems, in order to highlight some of the more notable and original features -- features which challenge the ingenuity of the translator. Yet the conceptual rigour and precision of the ideas expressed and the haunting rhythms which are captured here are more than a shadow of the original. Espriu's mission was to make the Catalan language sing and survive the bleak years when Franco insisted that a unified Spain required a single tongue and forbade the use of the other national languages. The vigour -- intellectual and lyrical -- of Espriu's poems was and remains an inspiration and a consolation to all Catalan speakers.

Two standpoints govern the approach taken to the poetry of Salvador Espriu in this extended study of his work. First, the author explores the structural implications of symmetry and numerology, in a chronological rather than thematic survey of the poetry - a procedure that involves a consideration of how each book attains its distinctive character while having common preoccupations and stylistic traits. Secondly, he examines the tension implicit in Espriu's poetry between involvement and detachment or between the civic and the lyric.

One of the defining texts of twentieth-century Catalan fiction, written by one of its most innovative and cherished writers, Salvador Espriu's Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a collection of thirty-four short stories in which the twists and turns of action, character, and place are as winding and sumptuous as the legendary maze of its title. Originally published in 1935 in the midst of great countrywide political and social upheaval, these stories are a mirror, a grotesque mirror, held up to Catalan and Spanish society. Infused with a deep sense of mythic power, blending social realism with lush modernist experiment, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a triumph of style. Perhaps best known for his poetry, Espriu's rich lyricism and highly evocative use of the Catalan language are here brought to life in the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips's remarkable English language translation of a classic of world literature.

"At last, a translation that does long overdue justice to the noble poetry of Salvador Espriu, one of this century's great lyric elegists." --William Arrowsmith

Este libro estudia detalladamente las obras de dos poetas modernos prototípicos: T. S. Eliot y Salvador Espriu. Su imaginario es comparable, puesto que se proyectaba desde su experiencia y cosmovisión personal así como desde su profundo conocimiento de la tradición literaria. Ambos revelan los paralelismos entre los contextos históricos y culturales en los que se crearon sus poemas y ejemplifican su propósito como poetas a la hora de preservar la tradición formada por sus predecesores y a la hora de suscribirse de un modo significativo a ella. El estudio de Dídac Llorens Cubedo lleva al lector a través de un viaje desde el árido desierto o la sórdida ciudad moderna hasta la paz imprecisa de un jardín ideal, desde las restricciones de lo secular hasta el todo sin trabas e intemporal imaginado por Eliot y Espriu, dos gigantes de la poesía.

Out of print for over a decade, this re-issue of the selected poems of Miguel Hernandez returns to print the only collection of his work in English. Born in 1910, Hernandez was a shepherd from the village of Orihuela in eastern Spain. He was self-educated and began writing and publishing in his early twenties. In the ten years he wrote, he created a poetry of an immense range.

La pell de brau has been called the most important book to appear in Spain in the 1960s. Grappling with themes of national, racial, and cultural identity, its frankness exhilarated and inspired the younger generation of artists to speak out on social and political issues. The Oxford Companion to Spanish Literature said of Burton Raffel's translation: "He has created an Espriu equally valid in English, a monument to a Catalan writer of world stature."