biography
| name: |
Riba Bracóns, Carles
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pronunciation:
[reeba brakons]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1897–1959)
|
| biography:
| Catalan poet and scholar, born in Barcelona, NE Spain. He was active in the Bernat Metge foundation from 1942, publishing Greek and Latin classics with Catalan translations. Professor of Greek at the Autonomous University of Barcelona until 1939, he then went into exile until 1942. He was personally responsible for the editions of Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Eclogues, Plutarch's Vitae parallelae, and complete editions of Sophocles and Euripides. His finest poetry, Primer llibre d'estances (1919) and its sequel Estances: Llibre segon (1930), is classical and formally disciplined. His exile after the Civil War produced Tres suítes (1939) and Elegies de Bierville (1942), influenced by Goethe, which have been translated into Castilian by Alfonso Costafreda. Riba's other translations include Versions de Hölderlin (1944) and Poemas de Kavafis (1962). After returning to Catalunya he published Del jòc [jóc?] i del fóc (1946), a sonnet sequence Salvatge cor (1952), and Esboç de tres oratoris (1957). Vol 1 of his Obres completes (1965) consisted of Poesia i narrativa. In the Catalan resurgence from c.1912 he had already exercised some influence with Folguera, d'Ors, and Carner, but his prestige had grown much greater by the time he returned from exile in the late 1940s, and Espriu, Rosselló-Pòrcel, Joan Petit, Eduard Valenti, and many others reveal a profound debt to him in their best work. A bilingual anthology of his work (Catalan and English) was produced by Joan Gili (Oxford, 1964). |
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