Salvador Espriu
trans. by Cyrus Cassells
Song of Twilight
after Sebastia, Francesc, and Isabel
went to play on the mountain called Bad Weather
Children’s voices whisked away
the sun I was accustomed to seeing.
So much summer light
spurred me to dreaming.
A clock on a white wall announces
the ebbing afternoon.
A docile wind is vanishing
on dusk-lit roads.
Maybe tomorrow
a slow, durable brightness
will act as balm
to my burning gaze.
But now it is night,
and I linger alone
in the house of the dead,
whom only I recall.
Salvador Espriu (1913–1985) was Catalan Spain’s leading contender for the Nobel Prize. Before the Spanish Civil War, he was a literary prodigy in fiction. When Franco came to power and banned the Catalan language from public use, Espriu turned almost exclusively to poetry and plays. As he struggled to preserve his censored language and culture, his work achieved a spare intensity and a bare-bones beauty, reminiscent of Beckett.
photo by Cameron Lartigue
Cyrus Cassells is the author of The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, The Crossed-Out Swastika, and The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, and the translator, from the Catalan, of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas. He’s a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches at Texas State and lives in Austin.