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The Body's Reason
by Maria-Merce Marcal
Fifty Love Poems
by Montserrat Abello
(Both Francis Boutle, £9.99)
These bilingual volumes of Catalan poetry by women poets with English translations are the latest gems from lesser-used languages to be published by Francis Boutle.
Maria-Merce Marcal (1952-1998) - poet, feminist, political activist, essayist, translator and critic - was born in the interior of Catalonia at the height of Franco's dictatorship. She is a key figure in post-Franco Catalan poetry, who was actively engaged in the transition to democracy and the emergence of a feminist movement in Spain.
In an early statement of her poetic intent she wrote: "I am grateful to fate for three gifts: to have been born a woman, from the working class, and an oppressed nation." Her Fifty Love Poems is a collection about love, ranging from the erotic and tenderness for missing loved ones to the passion for life and writing.
Montserrat Abello was born in 1918 and is still productive. During the Spanish civil war she was an interpreter for the International Brigades, after which she escaped to London and eventually to Chile. She returned to Catalonia in 1960. Her poems, a tapestry of intimacy and love, are impressively spare. She is the translator of her own poems, as well as translating some of Marcal's works.
Anthologies of contemporary letters in Spain tend towards the male and Castilian. These beautifully produced volumes combining the poetry of women and minority languages do much to correct this imbalance.
With Catalonia and Catalan culture opening up to Europe these books make the works of Marcal and Abello accessible to a wider poetry-reading public. Readers may be surprised by their distinctly international flavour, with echoes of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
These latest volumes come hard on the heels of News From The Other World, poems in Romani by Ilija Jovanovic and the amazing Solstice And Other Poems by Occitan poet Aurelia Lassaque.
With such excitingly diverse languages and voices, publishers Francis Boutle are to be congratulated in extending our awareness of a new literary landscape.
Gwyn Griffiths
