biography
pronunciation:
[espreeoo]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1913–85)
|
| biography:
| Major Catalan poet, born in Santa Coloma de Farners, Gerona NE Spain. His family moved when he was two to Arenys de Mar, on which he based the mythical country of ‘Sinera’, celebrated in many of his poems and his prose fiction. Much of his best work has constituted a meditation on death, and is marked by his sense of loss at the passing of the old way of life in such small communities as Sinera. His poetry includes Cementiri de Sinera (1946), Les cançons d'Ariadna (1949), Obra Lírica (1952, including ‘Les hores’ and ‘Mrs Death’, published in Castilian, 1956), El caminant i el mur (1955), and Final del laberint (1955). La pell de brau (1960) was published in Castilian as La piel de toro (1968) and is widely regarded as the most important book to appear in Spain in the 1960s, much concerned with national problems. His Obra poética (1963) contained all his previous work with the new Llibre de Sinera, separately published in Castilian in 1966. Later collections include Setmana Santa (1971). A precocious prose-writer, he has also written novels El doctor Rip (1932), Laia (1932), and Miratge a Citerea (1935), and short stories Aspectes (1934), Ariadna al laberint grotesc (1935), and Letizia i altres proses (1937). Among his essays are those in a volume entitled Evocació de Roselló-Pòrcel (1963). His plays include Antígona and Fedra (1950), an ‘improvisation for puppets’ entitled Primera història d'Esther (1948), and Ronda de mort a Sinera (1966), a theatrical montage by Ricardo Salvat using texts from Espriu. |
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