Joan Margarit wins the Cervantes Prize. 4 poems - Love Quotes Blog

Joan Margarit has just won the 2019 Cervantes Prize. The most important literary award in the Castilian language, endowed with 125,000 euros, has gone to the hands of this Catalan poet who has cultivated his work in both languages, as a champion of a cultural conjunction beyond of any ideology. These are 4 of his poems to know, read or rediscover it.

Joan Margarit
Joan Margarit i Consarnau was born in Sanahuja, Lleida, on May 11, 1938. He is a retired poet, architect and professor at the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. As a poet he began publishing in Castilian back in the 60s with Cantos para la Coral de un hombre hombre. And he didn't do it again until ten years later with Chronicle. A few years later he started publishing in Catalan. He is himself the translator of his work in Spanish, although he also writes indistinctly in one or the other. Last year he published his memoirs: To have a house you have to win the war.

In 2008 Joan Margarit was the National Poetry Prize and also the National Literature Prize of the Generalitat of Catalonia. And in 2013 he also won the Poetas del Mundo Latino Víctor Sandoval award, from Mexico. This Cervantes Prize puts a peak to his career, which is also that of one of the most read contemporary poets in Spanish.

An anthology to read it is that of All poems (1975-2015). I have chosen these four.

4 poems

Four o'clock in the morning
Howl the first dog, and then
there is an echo in a courtyard, others resonate
at the same time in a single bark,
Bronco and without any rhythm.
They bark, with their snouts towards the sky.
Where do you come from, dogs? What tomorrow
evoke the barking of the night?
I hear how you bark at my daughter's dream
from the pallet, surrounded by excrement
with which you indicate a territory
of alleys, courtyards, open fields.
As I have been doing
With my poems, from where I howl
and mark the territory of death.

The letter

You always looked forward
as if the sea were there. You created
in this way a wave movement
alien and mythical on some beach.
We were joined by the dangerous force
That gives love loneliness.
It still shakes between my fingers,
imperceptibly this paper.
Abandoned road between you and me,
Covered by letters, dead sheets.
But I know that the road persists.
If I leave my hand on the small wad,
I feel her rest on your back.
You used to listen forward
as if the sea were there, already transformed
in a tired, hoarse and warm voice.
Little unites us yet: only the tremor
of this fine paper between the fingers.

The wait

You are missing so many things.
Thus fill the days
moments made of waiting for your hands,
to miss your little hands,
They took mine so many times.
We have got used to your absence.
It's been a summer without your eyes
and the sea will also have to get used to it.
Your street, even for a long time,
will wait, in front of your door,
With patience, your steps.
You will never get tired of waiting:
No one knows how to wait like a street.
And this will fill me
that you touch me and that you look at me,
That you tell me what I do with my life,
while the days go, with rain or blue sky,
organizing loneliness now.

Headlights at night

I try to seduce you in the past.
The hands behind the wheel and this light
tablier nightclub let me
-winter fantasy- dance with you.
Behind me, just like a big truck,
Tomorrow makes gusts of lights.
No one drives it and overtakes me,
but now you and I travel together
and the car can be the two horses
from the sixties to Paris.
"Je ne regrette rien" sings Edith Piaf.
Under the window, night enters
Cold highway, and the past
approaching face, quickly:
cross and blind me without lowering the lights.