The Garden of the Five Trees
By Salvador Espriu, translated by Andrew Kaufman and Antonio Cortijo Ocana
After, when it had already
caused me much harm and
I could do almost nothing but smile,
I chose the simplest
words, to tell myself
how the sun’s gold
passed lightly over the ivy
in the garden of the five trees.
It was a brief yellow of sunset,
in the winter, while the last
winding fingers of water
fell from high clouds,
and the strange time compelled me
to enter prisons of silence.
About the authors:
Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) published nine books of poetry, had three plays produced, and while in his late teens and early twenties published six novels before giving up fiction to concentrate on poetry. Nearly forty years after his death he continues to be regarded as Catalonia's de facto national poet. During his lifetime he won every major literary prize available to Catalan poets. Described by Harold Bloom as "an extraordinary poet by any international standard" and "deserving of a Nobel prize," Espriu's poetry is all but unavailable in English and unknown this side of Catalonia and Spain due largely to the obscurity of the Catalan in which he wrote. The cumulative impact of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's suppression of the Catalan language and culture, and the childhood deaths of a sister and brother along with his own near death from a bronchial illness that required three years of bed rest is reflected in many of his poems. He devoted the time spent convalescing to an intensive reading program focused on ancient Greek, Latin, Hebraic, and Egyptian literature that likewise had a major influence on his work. When well enough he traveled extensively in Italy, Greece, Egypt, and what was then Palestine. Following the death of his father, Espriu spent two dispiriting decades laboring in a notary (a type of law practice) to support his mother and surviving siblings. He lived with a sister his entire adult life which was uneventful except for the succession of literary prizes he won, the death of his close friend and mentor, the symbolist poet Barteneu Rossello-Porcel, when both were in their mid twenties, and the impact of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.
Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is the founding Director of the Center for Catalan Studies and the founding editor of the journal eHumanista (www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu). A native Catalan speaker, he has written over 50 books including six volumes of translations, plus critical editions of texts in Catalan, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, and monographs on Iberian Peninsula and colonial Latin-American culture, history, religion, and literature. He received the 2001 Diputación de Sevilla award for his Theory of History and Political Theory in 16th-century Spain; the 2011 Scripta Humanistica award for his Catalan Humanism (together with J. Butinyà); and the 2017 Francesco Saverio Nitti award for his translation of Ramon Llull´s A Contemporary Life (Vita coaetanea) from Latin into Spanish and English.
Andrew Kaufman is the author of Earth's Ends, winner of the Pearl Poetry Award; The Cinnamon Bay Sonnets, winner of the Center for Book Arts Book Award; Both Sides of the Niger (Spuyten Duyvil Press); the Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets (Rain Mountain Press); and The Rwanda Poems: Voices and Visions from the Genocide (New York Quarterly Books), based on interviews he conducted in Rwanda with genocide survivors and, in prisons, with convicted perpetrators of the genocide. He is a recipient of an NEA award in poetry and has taught literature and writing at numerous universities and colleges. He earned his doctorate in English Literature at the University of Toronto. His co-translations, with Antonio Cortijo Ocana, of Salvador Espriu's poetry have appeared in a number of journals and magazines including World Literature Today, Commonweal, Another Chicago Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Today's American Catholic, and On the Seawall.
