Love Is a Place

By Joan Margarit

Foreword by Sharon Olds.

Joan Margarit is one of Spain’s major modern writers. Born in 1938, he worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but for the past four decades has become known for his mastery of the Catalan language, and is now, arguably, Spain’s most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he has translated.

In the much praised Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), Joan Margarit evoked the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, reminding us that it is not death we have to understand but life. In his later collection, Strangely Happy (2011), he builds an architecture of the human spirit out of the unpromising materials of self-doubt, despair and death.

Now, in Love Is a Place

, which brings together his three most recent collections, he finds himself face to face with the prospect of his own death, while rediscovering love. 'Death is the final solitude,' he writes in 'On the ground', but the image at the end of the poem is one of hope, of love, and of home, not 'the skeleton with the scythe that Dürer engraved' but 'a brightly-lit window in a dark street.' The three collections see him moving from despair to self-knowledge, confronting his old demons with honesty and courage. Love, it seems, is not after all 'hard or far away', nor was the signal lost, because, in the poet's words,

Love is a place.
It endures beyond everything: from there we come.
And it's the place where life remains.


'I love these poems for many reasons. When I first read Joan Margarit, I heard a powerfully distinctive voice, a spirit of great freedom and energy, humaneness, mischief, and depth. In these naked, subtle, clear poems, surprise and wisdom are often right next to each other… Each of Margarit’s poems is its own being, like a living creature with its own body-shape and voice, its own breath and heart-beat. His poems live and breathe in their natural habitat. They are elegant and shapely. And sometimes they seem almost overheard, as if they are singing in the voice the mind uses when talking with itself or with its close close other. It is common enough speech, and it is brilliant, too, sensually beautiful (but not too beautiful) and with a genuine, just-conceived feeling.' – Sharon Olds

'His work is time-haunted and death-haunted, but the poems also have a wonderful, clear, intelligent light in them. Margarit is perhaps firstly a love poet, and, readers can be assured, his loves are more often flesh and blood than steel.' – Carol Rumens, The Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Nov 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781780373294

Joan Margarit

Joan Margarit (1938-2021) was born in Sanaüja, La Segarra region, in Catalonia. He was an architect as well as a poet, and from 1968 until his retirement was also Professor of Structural Calculations at Barcelona’s Technical School of Architecture, working for part of that time on Gaudí’s Sagrada Família cathedral. He first published poetry in Spanish, but after four books decided to write in Catalan. From 1980 he began to establish his reputation as a major Catalan poet. As well as publishing many collections in Catalan, he published Spanish versions of all his work, gaining recognition as a leading poet in Spanish. In 2008 he received the Premio Nacional de Poesía del Estado Español for his collection Casa de Misericòrdia, as well as the Premi Nacional de Literatura de la Generalitat de Catalunya. In 2013 he was awarded Mexico’s Premio de Poetas del Mundo Latino Víctor Sandoval for all his poetry. He was awarded the 2019 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honour, worth €125,000, which generally alternates between Spanish and Latin American writers. He received this from King Felipe VI of Spain at a special ceremony at Barcelona's Palauet Albéniz in December 2020, the presentation being delayed by the coronavirus pandemic: the award is usually presented every April at an event in Madrid on the anniversary of the death in 1616 of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. He also received the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry 2019, the most important poetry award for Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), translated by Anna Crowe, the first English translation of his Catalan poetry, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Strangely Happy, a selection of later poems from Casa de Misericòrdia (2007) and Misteriosament feliç (2008), also translated by Anna Crowe, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. A third translation by Anna Crowe, Love Is a Place (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) includes all the poems from three recent Catalan collections: No era lluny ni difícil (It Wasn’t Far Away or Difficult, 2010), Es perd el senyal (The Signal Is Fading, 2012) and Estimar és un lloc (From Where to Begin to Love Again, 2014). His final collection Wild Creature (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), also translated by Anna Crowe, brings together poems from his two latest collections, Un hivern fascinant (An amazing winter, 2017) and Animal de bosc (Wild creature, 2020).

Book preview

JOAN MARGARIT

LOVE IS A PLACE

Translated by Anna Crowe

Catalan writer Joan Margarit is Spain’s most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. In his much praised Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (2006), he evoked the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, reminding us that it is not death we have to understand but life. In his later collection, Strangely Happy (2011), he builds an architecture of the human spirit out of the unpromising materials of self-doubt, despair and death.

Now, in Love Is a Place – which brings together his three most recent collections – he finds himself face to face with the prospect of his own death, while rediscovering love. ‘Death is the final solitude,’ he writes in ‘On the ground’, but the image at the end of the poem is one of hope, of love, and of home, not ‘the skeleton with the scythe that Dürer engraved’ but ‘a brightly-lit window in a dark street’. The three books which make up Love Is a Place see him moving from despair to self-knowledge, confronting his old demons with honesty and courage.

‘I love these poems for many reasons. When I first read Joan Margarit, I heard a powerfully distinctive voice, a spirit of great freedom and energy, humaneness, mischief, and depth. In these naked, subtle, clear poems, surprise and wisdom are often right next to each other… Each of Margarit’s poems is its own being, like a living creature with its own body-shape and voice, its own breath and heart-beat… It is common enough speech, and it is brilliant, too, sensually beautiful (but not too beautiful) and with a genuine, just-conceived feeling.’ – Sharon Olds

Cover photograph © George Rose / Getty Images

JOAN MARGARIT

Love Is a Place

TRANSLATED BY

ANNA CROWE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Love Is a Place is a translation by Anna Crowe of Joan Margarit’s three most recent Catalan collections: No era lluny ni difícil (It Wasn’t Far Away or Difficult, 2010), Es perd el senyal (The Signal Is Fading, 2012) and Estimar és un lloc (From Where to Begin to Love Again, 2014), all published by Edicions Proa S.A., Barcelona. The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Institut Ramon Llull.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Foreword by

SHARON OLDS

First book:

IT WASN’T FAR AWAY OR DIFFICULT (2010)

It wasn’t far away or difficult

Strolling

Love will have the final word

Classicism

Dry-stone walls

Penultimate poem to my mother

Shutting up the beach apartment

Poetry, a ballad

The darker part of the path

Raquel

I’ll wait for you here

Tunnel

The explanation

The origins of tragedy

Resources

Young ones in the night

Deer

Buoys

Coming out of a cinema

Old man on the beach

Metaphysical tale

A place

Last poem to my mother

Lyric at 70

Suffering

The sun on a portrait

The heaviest hour

Architect in Las Palmas

Couple

The Holocaust Museum, Jerusalem

Reading

Street at night in Santa Coloma

Evening

A History

May ’68

Mothers calling

Anniversary with statue

Breast cancer

Fragments

They will want you to die

What sustains me

What kind of lives

Sailing alone

Twilight

Halley’s Comet at Forès

Like the seagulls

Those times

Second book:

THE SIGNAL IS FADING (2012)

The signal is fading

Poetry

An old woman

Having had supper

Withdrawal

Singing of that damned anger (1938)

Drought accords well with growing old

A structure

A village

People at the beach

Foreigner

Six years old

Life and poetry

Dignity

5th of January ’43

The flag

Learning in the street

On happiness

Power cuts

At an exhibition

Soviet music

Birds and sacks

The house

The big parterre

Bad people and places of safety (1951)

Prince’s Square

Education

The gramophone

Military camp

J.A.G.H.

Sant Jordi College

Light at Colera

The Museum of Modern Art

Celebrity

The angel’s darkness

The dawns of the romantic man

Winter

Joan Maragall

Computing laboratory

A small church

Don’t forget

Nothing exalts the old

Where the future ends

First night at Forès

Jazz

Celebration

Poet

Summers at Campanet with Joana

Toast

Adultery

The badly-closed cage

Being who you say you are

Fable

Poem of the last refuge

The goodbye

Summer night

Altamira

Having coffee as day is breaking

White clouds in the blue air

Being from there, going there

Goodbye, Tel-Aviv

Making a source ripple

Infidelity

Fifty years later

When everything was simple

Towards dusk

The beginnings of something

Song of gratitude

A sentimental tale from memory

Visits to building works

Third book:

FROM WHERE TO BEGIN TO LOVE AGAIN (2014)

Love is a place

Autumn friendship

The failure

Aubade

I come from there

Helping

Barcelona

A woman of sense

Arcadi Volodos: sonata D.984

Grief

Pillage

A generous time

Distant

Mother and son

The silent man

Greeting

Days in Turó-Park, 1948

Man walking above a sea of mist

Self defence

Republican ghost on the Rambla

One of so many lost tragedies

Like a Rembrandt

Fog

Rainy afternoon in the courtyard

City

Calm

The last time

Lovers on the metro

Deluded

On the ground

Contemporary music

Knowledge

Hunger

José Emilio Pacheco’s wheelchair

November journey

Babel

Hotel Colón, Barcelona

Your dead one

Golden wedding anniversary

The poem

False alarm

Identity

EPILOGUE

About the Author

Copyright

FOREWORD

I love these poems for many reasons. When I first read Joan Margarit, I heard a powerfully distinctive voice, a spirit of great freedom and energy, humaneness, mischief, and depth.

In these naked, subtle, clear poems, surprise and wisdom are often right next to each other. There is often a doubleness going on in a poem – lots of pairs of ions, the magnetic positives and negatives which hold matter together. This gives his poems a sense of naturally occurring disorder and order, and a welcome absence of wilful craft. There is an exhilarating sense of the spontaneous, the organic – of happenstance and chance. And at the end of a good number of his poems I have the desire to scream – as at a theorem proved, or a victory.

Joan Margarit’s work is fierce, and it is partisan – it is on the side of fresh perception. He’s a fierce protector of his precise truth, like the bees – like a