A Review of Cyrus Cassells’ To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu — December 21, 2023 by C.W. Emerson
In his stunning new translation, To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, poet Cyrus Cassells immerses the reader in the rich, translucent pathos of Catalan poet Salvador Espriu’s work, first rendered in a language condemned in its own time.
Like Cassells, Espriu was a prodigious and successful author in his youth, producing an oeuvre of novels and short stories. But amidst the brutality of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Franco regime’s injunction against the use of his native and beloved Catalan (“Don’t bark; speak the language of the empire!”), he refused to engage in any public activity or to write in Spanish. Espriu was thus silenced throughout the years of the war and those that followed. He felt that his world had been literally destroyed by the war, which had just begun.
It was then that Espriu was moved to begin writing poetry, focusing his gaze on themes of mortality and death, lamenting not only the “death” of his native Catalan, but also experiencing the heartbreak of losing his close companion, the Mallorcan poet Bartomeu Rossellò-Pòrcel. His collegiate study of history interrupted, his dream of becoming an Egyptologist relinquished, Espriu would not return to higher education until after the death of Franco, and after that time, he worked in the office of a notary public.
How does one limn dividing lines between the living and the dead, between freedom of expression and censorship, between liberty and life as a prisoner? Espriu’s poetry is suffused with an intellectual and Kabbalistic mysticism rooted in “negative theology,” which postulates that all that one can know of God or of the divine is that God’s true nature is essentially unknowable. Scholar Didac Llorens Cubedo says that Espriu focused his poetic work on the kingdom of death, the ending of time—the negation of the life which lay before him, one in which the existence of God was not a given.
At the same time, the poet remained embodied, a sentient being, and his poetic work can also be viewed as an antiwar manifesto, one which finds the poet listening for the word “liberté” to be intoned and made manifest in the “ancient boundaries between vineyards and the sea,”—the iconic setting of the cemetery at Sinera, guarded by mighty cypresses, the site of many of Espriu’s most well-known poems.
In these translations, Cassells treads the ineffable line between sea and shore with surety, moving deftly between an emphasis on the spirit and the letter of Espriu’s stark and darkly lovely lyric poems, leaving his own distinct footprint through his vivid, full-bodied translations. And if, as Espiriu’s translator and Cassells’ colleague Magda Bogin asserts, Espriu’s poems constitute “a single lifelong meditation on the theme of death,” then Cassells’ luminous translation is the radiant upon which this work is revivified, imbued with new light and life.
We are the beneficiaries of Cassell’s twenty-five-year immersion in Espriu’s work. The two met only once, shortly before Espriu’s death, and with the Catalan poet’s blessing to proceed, Cassells has taken until now to pull back the veil and reveal his own English translations—how rich, indeed, that Espriu found English to be the language most befitting his work in translation.
As was the case in Cassells’ previously translated book from the Catalan, Still Life with Children, by renowned poet Francesc Parcerisas—to whom, among others, this volume is dedicated—Cassells generally opts for shorter lines and rhythms than in the original Catalan. It is a worthy challenge indeed for any translator to infuse the flinty, unsentimental verses of Espriu with new vigor and zeal. However, Cassells brings all the vivacity of his previous translation of Parcerisas to the task, and the lush beauty of this translation emerges like a palimpsest upon the canvas of Espriu’s meditations on the nature of mortality and death, the commingling of time and eternity, the unseen and “the sea-view, the teal blue swatch of the Mediterranean through the arched gate [of Sinera Cemetery]” (Parcerisas).
Perhaps Espriu’s “meditations on death” are best captured in Les Hores /The Hours, published in 1952. The first section of The Hours is dedicated to the memory of his mother, the second to Rossellò-Pòrcel, while the third section is in memory of Espriu’s alter ego, whom he named Salom, said to have perished on the day the Spanish Civil War commenced, July 19, 1936. Here, the poet’s uses the notion of time as synonymous with mortality, and the image of the sea as indicating eternity, the infinite, the passing of time, and thus, the end of the temporal.
The opening lines of the poem “Omnis Fortasse Morriar” (“Everything Might Die”) from the third section of TheHours, in which the speaker senses the nearness of death, are a fine example of the way in which Cassells’ approach differs from previous translations. This volume does not include versions of Espriu’s poems in Catalan, but Bogin’s earlier translation closely mirrors Espriu’s original Catalan in line length, stanza breaks, etc., as follows:
The dusk is filled with blood and an unknown combat magnifies the long moan of the setting sun behind the peaks.
Cassells’ translation creates four shorter, more concise lines:
Through the sheer beauty of his translation, with its tasteful embellishments, spare alliteration, and use of consonant clusters to create resonant images, Cassells leads us seamlessly into the volume’s third section, his own poems based on the work of Espriu. In the book’s title poem, “To the Cypress Again and Again,” Cassells reimagines a younger and perhaps less erudite version of himself, as he might have been when he met Espriu, discovering “an alphabet of cypresses and sea-light / Cassells, / the Name could be Mallorcan— / How old are you? / Twenty-seven, / And you’ve never read Don Quixote!”
In “Two Poets Quarreling Under a Jacaranda,” Cassells’ elegiac and classically lyrical six-part poem cycle, the poet explores Espriu’s relationship with Rossellò-Pòrcel, both before and after his companion’s untimely death from tuberculosis, ascribing Espriu’s turn to poetry to losing Bartolomeu, and thus becoming “all poetry, all silence and verse—.” Once again, war as the cause of truncated love.
The poems in this volume are more than mere snapshots of an epoch long since passed, or reminiscences of love and language lost. In an era when the rise of authoritarianism reaches ever more deeply into democracies the world over—and thus, come to haunt our dreams—Cyrus Cassells’ artful translations are also trenchant reminders of how essential the convergence of language and liberty is in these increasingly uncertain times.
