To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu

Cyrus Cassells, a masterful poet and translator, has created a unique and powerful hybrid translation/poetic homage to Catalunya's great twentieth-century poet Salvador Espriu. The lion's share of To the Cypress Again and Again is a supple translation of Espriu's first book, Sinera Cemetery, along with selections from other collections. A reader will come away with a poignant sense of Espriu's beloved seaside landscape as well as, in Espriu's words, his "precious Catalan's/ mysterious gold": a language that was suppressed and forbidden under Franco's regime. Cassells has given us an enduring gift to the memory of Espriu-through his personal introduction, his loving translations, followed by his own Espriu-inspired poems that evoke "an alphabet of cypresses and sea-light," thus transmuting Espriu's elegiac voice into Cassells's own.