The Prophetic Journey to Salvador Espriu

An interview with poet Cyrus Cassells about his translations and memoir, To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu

Author Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffith

I recently had the pleasure of welcoming Cyrus Cassells back to Poet to Poet talk about To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, a book of translations and memoir that was 40 years in the making.

Cyrus Cassells, the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas, is the author of nine books of poetry and two books of Catalan translations. His honors include a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the National Poetry Series, two NEA grants, and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award. He is a University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview. To hear Cyrus read poems from the book, check out the video (I highly recommend it).

The Prophetic Journey to Salvador Espriu

Radha Marcum: Cyrus, Welcome back to Poet to Poet.

Cyrus Cassells: It’s so good to be back. It's been almost exactly a year. Much has happened in a year.

Radha: I’m thrilled to be talking about your your latest book today. Perhaps we should start with an introduction to the poet whose work you translated for this book, Salvador Espriu. Who was he? How did you first encounter his work? And why were you drawn to translating his poems?

Cyrus: When I was about 25, I got it in my head that Barcelona was the place to be. So I started looking into the literature of that part of Spain. Catalan is one of the four languages of Spain. I started investigating the literature of Catalan. I read an article in The Village Voice by David H. Rosenthal, who at the time was the premier translator of Catalan literature into English. So I contacted him in New York, and I said, “How do I get a hold of these books?” and he said, “Well, you can come to my apartment, and I'll sell them to you.” 

So I bought some of the books. One of them was an anthology of modern Catalan literature. He also gave me the names of various Catalan writers, since I was going to visit there. So I found myself drawn to the work of Salvador Espriu. 

His was an interesting case. He was a prodigy. He began publishing fiction when he was about 17. He started in Spanish, and then he switched to Catalan, which was his native language. By the time he was 23, the Spanish Civil War erupted, and by the end of that war, the Catalan language was banned from public use. So he stopped writing fiction almost entirely, pretty much for the rest of his life, and devoted himself almost exclusively to writing poetry and plays. 

And then looking through the anthology, I was drawn to the poems about his home village, a coastal town just above Barcelona, particularly the vivid descriptions of the landscape. That's what pulled me in. I read it first in English. I read it then in Spanish to make sure I really wanted to translate it. 

I made the decision to learn to read Catalan based on my abilities in Spanish. About half the words and Catalan are almost the same as in Spanish. I had this very intricate process of going through three different languages to get to the work there. 

Espriu died in 1985. I was there in the summer of ’83. I went back September of 1984, and brought my translations to him. To meet him was a dramatic process, but I did get a chance to meet him in the few months before he died. 

It started out as a carefree endeavor but his work is very serious. It resembles Samuel Beckett—very existential. I was 26 and 27, so it took a lot of historical research to get in the wavelength of the poetry. It was quite challenging and painful to imagine. 

By then I'd won the National Poetry series when I was 23. To imagine my publishing possibilities stripped away from me—having started out in such a promising fashion—was part of the exercise of empathy that that needed to happen for this project. And it’s one of the reasons it took me 40 years from conception to now, this year, having this book. 

Espriu was very reclusive. He refused to work in Spanish. He worked in the Catalan language, but very few people in Barcelona got a chance to meet him, which is one of the reasons I chose to include a memoir in this book about my meeting with him there. Another Catalan poet, my age, arranged for us to go meet him with some of his old friends. 

Radha: There’s so much immediacy in the poems—in the images, in the poet’s direct address of the reader. I'm curious what it took to get that kind of immediacy into translation. Was it a challenge?

Cyrus: I think so. There’s a sense of intimacy. Plus, I would say pessimism or severity or austerity. Because once the language is stripped away, that’s what remains. His first book Sinera Cemetery was published underground in 1946, after the Spanish Civil War during World War II. The poems are almost Haiku-like in that book. 

I get that feeling of intimacy, like a whispering kind of voice, like Jorie Graham's voice—a sensitive person is there, who knows you and can direct you. Like, put your attention here. Consider this. Life is challenging and difficult, but it's possible to move through it with something resembling integrity. 

For Espriu and people in Catalonia, language was stripped away. They actually had signs in Barcelona that said, “Don't bark. Speak the language of the Empire.” It doesn't get more direct. What I was aiming for [in the translations] was something that helps the reader move past the starkness of the situation and the cogency of the poetry without succumbing to despair. I think of it as being like a flame keeper. 

Radha: The poems are just devastating.

Cyrus: I know. For me to be a 20-something wrestling with this was like, Why am I doing this? My own work was very lush, as you may be aware. But the translations were part of a spiritual journey I was on. I came to it as a stranger. And I left something else—an ambassador. 

So what happened? I worked on my translations and gave him to my mentor at the time, H. Joan Freeman. This is in Provincetown in 1984. She was the town astrologer and psychic. So I gave her the poems and she called me up. She said, “I read your I read your translations, and I need to talk to you right away. I can't tell you on the phone, I have to tell you in person.” 

So I went to her house. And she said, “While I was reading your translations, it became crystal clear to me that this man is going to die. So what I want you to do is to stop everything and go to Spain and meet him before he dies.” And it all came true. This is why it took me 40 years, because I was so freaked out by the whole thing that I didn't go back to Barcelona for 20 years. I thought if he saw me, he wasn't going to die. But he died. It remains this big mystery. What about all of that, right? 

So my friends in Barcelona put me up for free. I waited a whole month to try and see Espriu. Finally I told one of them about the prophecy and he helped arrange for me to meet Espriu, to give him my translations. We thought it would be an hour, because Espriu was reclusive. Famously so. 

Well, we stayed four hours because his friends came. And it was the week of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And they were saying, “You're our Nobel candidate.” Harold Bloom, the famous critic, later said he thought the Nobel Committee did wrong by not giving it to Espriu between the poetry, the plays, and the fiction. Espriu was laughing and said, “Oh, they'll never give it to a stateless language.” And I'm not sure they have since then. That was 1984. 

Then Espriu died the same weekend as my paternal grandfather, that was another coincidence. There was no evidence that he was ill, or anything, except my psychic friends like vision of him leaving. So that made translating the poems all the more complicated and tricky, and why I just kept working on them. I wanted feel like I had done justice to such a incredible person, such a brave person, someone so fully dedicated. He completely devoted himself to a language that might have died while he was still alive. 

Radha: There’s a sense of necessity and poignancy. Over these 40 years, how have you viewed the vitality of the work? And has that changed? How do you feel about it now?

Cyrus: When I was young, people didn't think it was going to live very long. I know that sounds dramatic. But I was very fragile physically, as a child. I had asthma and things. It kind of got into my head that I wasn't going to be a survivor. But what what has happened is the opposite. I am very much that survivor person who has outlived many of the people who thought I was too fragile. 

At the time I began working on the translations, I was realizing there were tapes playing in my head. I was talking in my sleep. My then girlfriend said, “You know, you say these things, how you’re too fragile. I was like, “Oh, did I? I don't want that tape playing anymore.” I consciously made that decision. 

But surviving a lot of other people turned out to be very much my life. In that period, men were dying in my community, were dying of AIDS. It was 1984. And I think getting on Espriu’s wavelength helped me to change my sense of myself, that I was a stronger person than what people were telling me I was. 

This was also a period where I had a writer's block, I had a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. About halfway through, I couldn't write anymore. So I started singing. And then I got interested in Catalan literature. And that helped me get the machinery going again, I think I had a writer's block about two years, and beginning to write the poems in my second book. 

There were 12 years between the first and the second book. Translation taught me word precision. I discovered in this period that I have a very large vocabulary for most Americans. I ended up spending time in Spain going to Russia with a group of older writers, and I became very, very sensitized to words. For me, it was about precision. What's the precise word in a language or mood? 

In the book I published last year, The World That The Shooter Left Us, I learned how to use silence and concision to work with difficult material. My natural mode is lush and buoyant. Translation helped me to understand that I have different registers as a person and also as a writer. 

But it taught me most how I can be a strong survivor. I just turned 66 on Monday, and I realize I just survived my father. My father died when he was 65. Looking back, that poetry was one of the first signs that I was going to be a person who outlasted a lot of difficult situations.

Radha: I certainly think of poetry as one of those pursuits that engenders resilience in the human spirit. And that seems very much part of all of the work that you do, not just in this book of translations. What do you think Espriu has to offer us right now, in 2023?

Cyrus: What it means to be a survivor of the ‘80s and ‘90s is to carry more than my own legacy. We've just gone through a period of global catastrophe. Many people have died. And yet, we're in this sort of fugue state about it. We haven't processed the actual trauma of having our world turned into a science fiction movie three years ago. 

Poetry has something to do with the inner flame that we all have. One way we access that inner flame is through language, or prayer, or envisioning things when things are severe. Belief in your language and your experience—creating and standing from that. Even if the world is trashing it and saying it's useless, or “a dog's bark” or whatever. For me, that's why there's a universal quality to Espriu. 

Given that English is the power language in the world, right now, there’s this intense language hierarchy. One of the things I learned from transcending Catalan was that each language contains its own window of the world. Each language is precious, has its own vision of reality. That's why it's so important to preserve various languages and dialects. There is a library in there. There is a code about how one lives on Earth, or reacts with various stimuli, and various landscapes and various people there. 

As an African American, it appealed to my sense of justice to learn to read Catalan. What are the real values? We can start to strip away some of the political/cultural stuff. What remains after that? 

Radha: Espriu’s poems are stripped down to the essence, the thing that you need to know right now.

Cyrus: Yes, the essential thing. You know, there's all this flotsam and jetsam in everyday life. Then a war comes along. We've learned this recently. But what are our priorities when our lives really are on the line? One of the reasons Espriu is so relevant now is that we're just coming out of a period like we haven't had for 100 years, a global pandemic when World War I was ending. We're moving into a new world, but we don't know what it is. It's still a very volatile, fragile, curious period. So having a person who has a steady voice is inspiring right now. 

Radha: I’m struck, as you're saying that, by how writing poetry mimics the precariousness of life. In the act of writing a poem, you don't necessarily know where it's going. You don't know the last line until you know it. There's something about the way in which a poet like Espriu arrives at that clarity, through that process of not knowing, that is empowering to a reader.

Cyrus: There's a strong quality of authority, the voice coming from something very deep or far away. So you listen. Maybe after you think, Was that really true? It sounded so true when it was said or expressed. The quality is so concentrated that comes from super-focused attention, or prayer or meditation.

Radha: It’s a quality we need more of, I think.

Cyrus: We’re at a period where the whole issue of appropriation is really a significant one. But in circumstances of life and extremists, a particular poet can carry the voices of other people out of necessity. You really can't understand Catalan literature very well if you don't understand the linguistic ban, how that affected people. So Catalan art is well known in the world, but it's taking longer time for Catalan literature to catch up because of the linguistic cruelty that was visited upon them there.

Radha: All the more reason for this book to come into the world to make that bridge, for you to be a flame carrier for this wonderful poet and his work. I'm curious, what was the biggest surprise for you in this undertaking? 

Cyrus: My aim, from the very beginning, was to create something that was really different, something that was very intimate, that was about my encounter with him. Even as I was putting it together, I was relieved that there was more than one person working on Espriu’s poetry. There have been three other three or four other volumes by other translators. 

I was after something that was like my mystical journey with him, something that felt very intimate and mysterious, like what had happened to me. One of the surprises was that I could actually create poems for him over the years, as the time passed, and to just experience different aspects of him as a personality and power.

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To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu  is available at Stephen F. Austin University Press or your favorite bookseller.

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