Salvador Espriu PRIMERA HISTORIA D'ESTHER THE STORY OF ESTHER Translated from the Catalan by Philip Polack 1989 THE ANGLO-CATALAN SOCIETY THE ANGLO-CATALAN SOCIETY OCCASIONAL PUBLICATIONS No. 1. Salvador Giner. The Social Structure of Catalonia (1980, reprinted 1984) No. 2. Joan Salvat-Papasseit. Selected Poems (1982) No. 3. David Mackay. Modern Architecture in Barcelona (1985) No. 4. Homage to Joan Gili (1987) No. 5. E. Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates. Alexandre de Riquer (1988) No. 6. Salvador Espriu. Primera història d'Esther with English version by Philip Polack and Introduction by Antoni Turull (1989). © Catalan text: Estate of Salvador Espriu 1989 © English version: Philip Polack 1989 © Introduction: Antoni Turull 1989 Produced and typeset by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Printed by BPCC Wheatons Limited, Exeter Cover design by Joan Gili British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available ISSN 0144-5863 ISBN 0-9507137-5-9 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 7 PRIMERA HISTÒRIA D'ESTHER/ 16 THE STORY OF ESTHER INTRODUCTION Salvador Espriu i Castelló was born in 1913, into a well-to-do family of Jewish origin, in Santa Coloma de Farners (in the province of Girona). From the age of two, however, he lived in the little seaside town of Arenys de Mar, where the family came from, and in the city of Barcelona, and it was to these two places that he really belonged. Espriu showed early signs of literary promise. His first book, Israel, written in Castilian Spanish, was published by the time he was sixteen. A rather shy and retiring man, Espriu was an avid reader and at this stage was influenced by the Spanish authors Ramon del Valle-Inclán, Gabriel Miró and by the Catalan Joaquim Ruyra, all three of them remarkable for the originality and richness of their language, something which could later be said of Espriu himself. Choosing now to write in Catalan, when Catalan culture was enjoying a period of prosperity under the second Spanish Republic, he published El doctor Rip when he was just eighteen and Laia in the following year, narratives of some originality which show him drawing away from the restrained formality which had prevailed in Catalan literature during the preceding years. The 1930s were full and creative years for Espriu: he graduated in Law and Ancient History, he published further stories, in the collections Aspectes and Ariadna al laberint grotesc, he formed a close friendship with the Majorcan poet Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel (1913-1938) and both came directly under the influence of the foremost poet of the period, Carles Riba (1893-1959). During the Civil War he was on the Republican side and survived the downfall of Catalonia; in the year of the victory of Franco's insurgent forces, among whom there were many Catalans from Espriu's social group, he wrote the play Antigona on the classic theme of war between brothers. That same year, 1939, when he was still a young man of twenty-six, another event was to leave its mark on him for life: the death of his father, which meant that he had to take on responsibility for the family law 8 Introduction practice, in which he was always to work in a subordinate position because he never showed any desire to qualify as a notary. From this time on he lived the life of a recluse, withdrawn and silent, partly because of his own character, but motivated also by the repulsion he felt for the authoritarian, Catholic and military forces which had once again, and with vicious cruelty, renewed their grip on Catalonia and the whole Spanish state. The language and culture of the Catalan people were particular victims, singled out because of their identification with the Republic and because of the autonomy they had so fully enjoyed in the 1930s: newspapers and periodicals in Catalan were now banned, books could be published only with great difficulty, Castilian alone could be used in schools, all expressions and symbols of community identity were banned. It was in this context, in the 1940s, that Salvador Espriu, a moderate man, realising that all the ideals of the pre-war and war years had become reduced to that of simple survival, made this situation of crisis the insistent theme of what can be considered the central products of his mature oeuvre: the poetry of Cementiri de Sinera (1946) and Les cançons d'Ariadna (1948) and the 'improvisation for puppets' Primera història d'Esther (1948). The move from prose to a highly distilled poetic idiom is now confirmed and in these three books one discovers the technique and the sources of inspiration which were to inform the rest of his literary output or what he ironically called his 'expansions of vanity'. As in the title of his first book of poems, the world of infancy and adolescence in Arenys (in reverse 'Sinera') is irrevocably linked with the theme of death. This same world of Arenys, similarly conceived, appears as the frame for Primera història d'Esther, a vigorous affirmation of the Catalan language, immensely rich in its vocabulary and full of characteristic turns of phrase, in which Espriu applies the conventions of the esperpento—defamiliarisation through distortion—to the original Bible story. Satire and lyricism are mingled here as they are in the Cançons d'Ariadna. Also fully developed in Esther is Espriu's persistent mythification of the childhood world of Arenys-Sinera: in his preface to the Catalan editions he highlights the impact made upon his youthful imagination by a set of French prints, illustrating episodes from the story of Esther, that had decorated the house of a dearly loved aunt. Espriu never abandoned his work as a lawyer; he revised and slightly extended his prose repertoire, produced a small amount of criticism, Evocació de Rosselló-Porcel i altres notes (1957) and a late play Una altra Fedra, si us plau (1978). The poetry-drama symbiosis, already present in Introduction 9 Primera història d'Esther, is apparent too in the way that some of his poems readily lent themselves to dramatic rendition in the theatrical montage of Ronda de mort a Sinera (1966), directed by Ricard Salvat. But it was with his poetry that he consolidated his name, with collections such as Les hores and Mrs. Death, both from 1952, El caminant i el mur (1954), Final del laberint (1955) and above all La pell de brau (1960) which had a great impact throughout Spain as well as in Catalonia itself. La pell de brau stands as one of the key works of Catalan social poetry, along with Vacances pagades (1960) by Pere Quart (pseudonym of Joan Oliver, 1899- 1986), belonging to a time when poetry in this vein was gathering an enthusiastic following and was linking up with the voice of protest and self- affirmation of the Catalan Nova Cançó. Espriu maintained his status as a 'modern classic' and continued writing poetry—Llibre de Sinera (1963), Setmana Santa (1971) and Per a la bona gent (1984)—right up to his death. In 1972 Salvador Espriu was awarded the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes and he was proposed several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was probably because he did not write in any official state language that he never received this ultimate accolade. He died in Barcelona in 1985 and was buried in the little cemetery of Arenys de Mar. * There is good reason to suppose that originally Espriu never expected his 'improvisation for puppets' to be seen on stage: the dramatis personae of all Catalan editions gives the six main characters and then an impish reference to 'the others that will take their turn at speaking', followed by a similar throw-away comment to the effect that stage directions are redundant. The text is much more a 'play for voices' than formal stage drama (as its English translator has perceived so well and registered in felicitous acknowledgements to the Dylan Thomas of Under Milk Wood). Even so Primera història d'Esther ('first' presumably because there is a second book in the Apocrypha) has enjoyed several widely acclaimed professional productions. The play's first performance was given by the Agrupació Dramàtica de Barcelona in March 1957 at the Palau de la Música Catalana, with music by Manuel Vails and directed by Jordi Sarsanedas. Five years before this, though, preparations had been made for a performance, with the same director, in the garden of a wealthy Barcelona family. A cast, including well-known figures such as Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Dr. Jeroni de Moragas, Joan Oliver and Rosa Leveroni, 10 Introduction had been rehearsed and the stage had been erected, when the owners of the garden suddenly took fright (presumably because of the political implications of the play) and cancelled the performance, giving the excuse that some of the family silver had been stolen during the preparations. This prompted a hilarious exchange between Espriu and Joan Oliver of some forty dècimes (as yet unpublished) lampooning the family. The whole grotesque episode is of a piece with the play itself. For the grotesque, satirical element is one of the three strains which, as his commentators stress, run through all Espriu's work, constantly in play with the lyrical-elegiac and with the poet's acute social critique. These three elements are integrated in the Primera història d'Esther with a particular complexity, because in this work—a play within a play—there are two totally separate worlds which interact at various moments and fuse completely at the end of the work: the 'real' world of Arenys, mythified as Sinera (a sublimation of the author's own life), on the one hand, and on the other, the world of Shushan, the biblical world, presented in the form of a puppet show. The grotesque element is concentrated entirely in King Ahasuerus and the characters connected with him, clearly showing Espriu's determination to denounce the stupidity and cruelty of dictators and tyrants. The satire, which runs through the whole play, comes chiefly from the mouths of those who represent the people. The lyrical and elegiac passages culminate in the words of the all-seeing blind man—The Most High, showman and oracle—who at the same time provides the moral point of view. But the social dimension of the work is not confined to this moral view; it appears too in the events the play recounts. The treatment of the Jewish minority by the Persians can be identified to a considerable extent with the treatment of the Catalans by the Spanish dictatorship. But Espriu was no fanatical partisan: in a letter to the translator he wrote of his entrebancós i entrebancat país—bis 'troublesome and troubled country'—and added 'But do not trust it too far: that is my honest advice'. He saw how quickly power can turn the oppressed into the oppressors: the frustrated massacre of the Jews by the Persians is followed by the massacre of the Persians by the Jews. At the end of the play the two worlds—Sinera and Shushan—merge in the person of The Most High: the performance had opened with him and it is he who closes it with an intensely moving speech, asking the audience to pray for a number of real people, dead and living, for him and for the poet Selyf-Espriu, for the Jews and their friends and, transcending the spirit of the Old Testament, for their enemies. Knowing the author's lack of any Introduction 11 traditional faith, we might feel that the plea for such a prayer was merely rhetorical It is perhaps more fitting, however, to interpret it as the expression of a desire for universal brotherhood, completely at one with Christianity—a formula which the social poets of the Spanish state sometimes used, consciously or unconsciously and only occasionally with such force, to challenge the Franco regime from a position the censors could not assault. The original readers and public of Esther were certainly able to decipher the artistic coding of the work and to find there a message of great relevance to their circumstance. Espriu was obsessed by death: 'my work is a meditation on death', he said to S. Paniker in 1969, 'in order to rid myself of the fear of it'. Like many genuinely creative talents, the poet faced up to what plagued him most and made poetry of it. We can see that the Primera història d'Esther is the finit of long reflection on the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War which followed it, leading him to the rejection of all forms of violence and all forms of injustice, in order to reach the sacred principle of humanity which, for Espriu, was peaceful co-existence. The message is all the more poignant if it is related to the dark days in which Esther was written. * By the time the translator, Philip Polack, read the play in 1970, the restrictions on Catalan language and culture had been partly relaxed: they were dancing sardanes in front of the cathedral in Barcelona, and the Catalan pop and protest singers were in full cry. What appealed to him in the play was the ingenious use it made of the Esther story—as familiar to him as it had been to Espriu—and the genuine universality of a treatment which so proudly asserts 'parochial' roots. The play, he felt, deserved a wider audience, and as a solution to some of the difficulties involved, the setting was transferred from Catalonia to Wales. This deft move is to be seen as a literary strategem rather than as a parallelism to be taken literally. The comparison between Catalonia and Wales does, nevertheless, raise some important considerations concerning minority communities, their sense of identity and their relations with more powerful neighbours: the priority of language as token of identity; the deep relevance of community feeling, traditions and symbols; the ways in which their differentiated character is constantly in danger of being engulfed and reduced to 'folksy' superficiality. The reasons for the transposition to Wales were threefold: first, to make clearer to British readers or audiences the distinctiveness and richness of 12 Introduction the Catalan culture of the original, to show how different it is from that of the ruling power, particularly through linguistic signs—speech and names—and through some of its customs; secondly, to suggest that the problems of minorities are not confined to Catalonia; and thirdly, to express and perhaps capture for others some of the warm affection and nostalgia that Espriu felt for a place and a people and turned into the myth of Sinera. By no means all the problems of translation were solved by the 'Welshing' of the setting. Espriu, on his own admission, wrote Esther as though he were composing 'the last will and testament of the Catalan language', as a linguistic and poetic monument to a culture he felt acutely was in danger of annihilation. To this end—in keeping with the increasing inwardness and the almost mystical hermeticism of his other poetry, and in response also to the pressures of censorship—he sought the innermost resources of his native tongue. These he filtered and intensified, retaining maximum stretch over a range that extends from local dialect and the colloquial to the most refined formality. One of his motives was clearly to mark, for all time as it were, the uniqueness of the Catalan language, and the writer was fully aware of the demands he was placing upon his audiences and readers, as is evidenced in The Most High's reference to 'indigestible words... a dying form of speech almost unintelligible by now to many of us'. Espriu himself on one occasion even announced that he intended to translate Esther into Catalan! This knowing allusion to the work's notorious 'difficulty', even for native Catalans, is a measure of the challenge confronting his translator into English. The reader of this parallel-text edition can judge for himself the extent of Philip Polack's success and even perhaps test Espriu's own judgement, expressed in the letter reproduced, that the English version achieves perfection. This version of Esther was first performed, slightly abridged and under the title of Good Queen Esther, by the Department of Hispanic Studies of the University of Bristol in February 1979, directed by John Lyon and Philip Polack, and with music by Colin Sell. ANTONI TURULL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The translator would like to express his warm appreciation of the help given to him by Montserrat Roig and, through her, by the author himself. The Anglo-Catalan Society is happy to acknowledge the following debts of gratitude: To Antoni Turull for his 'historic' commitment to this project. To Philip Polack for generously agreeing to publication in the Anglo-Catalan Society Occasional Publications series, and for his dedicated involvement in preparing the whole text for the printers. To Dr. Josep Espriu and to Edicions 62 of Barcelona (especially Josefina Revilla) for their consideration in granting permission to reproduce the Catalan text of Primera història d'Esther. To the Fundació Congrés de Cultura Catalana and to the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya) for grants which have made the present edition possible; to the Institute) de España en Londres for continued support to the ACSOP series. To Pauline Climpson and her colleagues at Sheffield Academic Press for their patience and professionalism in seeing this volume through all the stages of production.