Product Description

CATALAN POEMS

Introduction – Translation – Commentary by  Miltiades HATZOPOULOS

By all accounts, Cantilena (Chant), published in 1937, is Josep Sebastià Pons’s best poetry collection. Having reached the ultimate level with respect to his professional life, the poet enjoys his family, nature, and the monuments of his country, when, in 1933, Elena, his wife and muse, dies unexpectedly. Since then, his sense of completeness gives place to the nostalgic reflection of the past and the melancholy regarding time that passes by; the continuous communion between the living and the dead transmutes Elena’s loss into an elegy, into a song of mourning. Elena is physically absent but is mentally present more than ever before. This bilingual edition, through the Greek translation, wishes to convey to the reader the meaning of the original Catalan text together with the idea, even vague, of its cadence.