Joan Margarit

An amazing winter


The poppies are disappearing,
wiped out like the weeds.
Very soon, the wind’s red brushstrokes
will no longer blow through fields of wheat.
Who will be able to make sense, one day,
of Van Gogh’s paintings?
The world I live in is still familiar,
though subtle changes already alert me:
it won’t go back to being mine.
It’s not about it being a hell: it can be understood.
Oblivion comes, reassuring us.
And happiness, happiness always returns.

*

Works of love


The motive doesn’t matter.
We have to search among the remains for what has survived.
Might we not feel ourselves insecure
if our feelings
were frontier lands
lost, regained, lost once more?
For loving is not falling in love.
It is going on building, time and again,
the same courtyard in which to listen to the blackbirds
in springtime when it’s still dark.
It is the only birdsong that could be Schubert.
You and I as in our twenties, alone in the kitchen,
we grow strong listening to that melody.
We have never had so much light as now.

*

Through pain


I’ve never forgotten the blow to the back of my head from a guardia civil
who told me loudly and harshly: Speak a Christian tongue, boy!
Until I was in my forties, the police
would conduct their questioning using torture.
Only in Castilian.

But through so many humiliations
before the words something else reached me.
Gentle and indestructible.
As clear as nothing else would ever be.
It came from a place that I think is childhood.
Sometimes I feel it mixed with music,
like ten or fifteen notes that suddenly move me,
but I don’t know why or since when.
As though it were a tomb with no name
to which for love’s sake I have always brought roses.

It is the strength and light of something unknown to me.
It warns me, protects me from a place that I do not love.
From a pointless rancour. From myself. From others.
From some dangerous indifference.
It is in my poems.
For that reason, too, I have written them in Castilian.

*

From poverty


They were my earliest years, when my eyes opened
on a broad landscape of dry-farming.
I’ve never forgotten the marvellous moment
of clapping my hands at the water of the channel
when my grandfather, by raising the little sluice-gate,
allowed it to enter the field,
and flow along all the gullies made by the hoe.
Happiness comes to me from poverty.
Sometimes, in the broad but harsh
landscape of dry-farming that is my present age,
I sense the child’s eyes questioning me,
smiling and trusting, asking if we are coming
to the place where I always told him we were going.

*

Epilogue


A moment has come when I need
to imagine what will not happen next.
I’m talking about that ancient, dangerous force
that clearly grasps where you are going
and doesn’t care that it may be useless.
I send out a cry directed at myself
like a last opportunity.
To smile at a ridiculous place while fearing nothing
and without distinguishing between truth and falsehood,
but to do it with the force that truth has
that it has never claimed to be. And which it isn’t.
A force that many of us will have been aware of,
like a storm beating against the rocks,
and which I carry inside me
like the sea gone calm inside a cave
from which the noise of the storm can be heard.
A time I want to go back to when my shadow,
the one I had as a child, comes back to take my hand,
when that well-known moment comes.
That is the closest to a truth
and also the furthest from a lie
that my solitude can make use of.

 

AN AMAZING WINTER (2017)
    12     An amazing winter
    13     Atocha Hill
    14     The mysterious island
    15     Works of love
    16     Woman about to do her hands
    17     Building a destiny
    18     Verdaguer
    19     Familiarities
    20     Goyescas
    21     On insults
    22     Memory’s punishment
    23     North wind
    24     Our time
    25     Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
    26     All-in wrestling
    27     Stroke
    28     Future
    29     The albatross
    30     Road
    31     Through pain
    32     What enlightens me
    33     More than a song
    34     Thermopylae
    35     Life
    36     Golden Age
    37     Rides
    38     Photograph of a girl
    39     De senectute
    40     Jorge Manrique
    41     If you read this book
    42     Time’s lyric
    43     Courage
    44     Final performances
    45     Known cruelty
    46     Purposes
    47     Behind the glass
    48     Instants
    49     Mythology
    50     The solitude of the sea
    51     No other beginning
       
    53     Epilogue to An amazing winter


WILD CREATURE (2020)
    58     The two snowfalls
    59     The kitchen
    60     Museums
    61     Silent woman
    62     Ángel González, a memory
    63     Don’t talk about this with anybody
    64     From poverty
    65     Clear and difficult
    66     Seductions, after so much time
    67     Lost village
    68     Wild creature
    69     Beloved time with her
    70     Iliad
    71     Note on truth
    72     Silence and survival
    73     First lesson
    74     Orpheus
    75     The calm of coming back
    76     The poem and the wall
    77     The depths of poverty
    78     Morning in Sant Just
    79     Family lunch
    80     A simple farewell
    81     The final intimacy
    82     The beginning of everything
    83     Protections, consolations
    84     Rachid Boujedra
    85     Faraway smiles
    86     Seagulls
    87     A price
    88     Chamber music
    89     Love and fear
    90     The long ending
    91     In the early morning
    92     What is approaching?
    93     The picture of Santes Creus monastery
    94     Autumn in Elizondo
    95     Final pause
    96     Murmur of rain
    97     The house
    98     Consolations
    99     Building
    100     Nightfall for old lovers
    101     The only loyalty
    102     Coming out of a concert
    103     Dark Night of the Soul
    104     Deep paradox
    105     Two encounters
    106     A poignant indifference
    107     Everything is going quiet
    108     Mistakes and sewers
    109     Inspiration
    110     Gratitude
    111     Reasons and ways
    112     Betrayal is no longer possible
    113     Walking through a forest at night
    114     A joyous prudence
    115     Building work
    116     Under a deep blue sky
    117     Sick old man
    118     About Babel
    119     Josep Maria Subirachs
    120     A daughter
    121     Vincent Van Gogh
    122     With you
    123     The forgotten dream
    124     Attempt at conclusions
    125     Courtyard song
    126     The past, so difficult at times
    127     Another happy world
    128     You, me and music
    129     Memory of a field
    130     Fear of what we are
    131     Our dead, Raquel
    132     One winter morning, 2020
    133     The highest mountain

    135     Epilogue
 
 

'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, Guardian.com (Poem of the Week)

One of the best, if not the very best, of all contemporary Catalan poets’ – Luis Antonio de Villena, El Mundo

‘Wow!…Erotic closeness, distance, passion, jealousy, indifference, night, death, imagination, apocalypse, and more all in a few lines and a few simple words…His themes [are] delivered with such fire and candour they inspirit’ – Herbert Lomas, Ambit

'I highly recommend the luminous, subtle Tugs in the Fog by the Catalan poet Joan Margarit, translated by Anna Crowe. The Spanish Civil War and its after effects, and the death of his handicapped daughter haunt poems which are nevertheless full of life' – Moniza Alvi, Poetry News

‘Poems in which the poet risks all…This is Margarit at the height of his powers, able to move us more than ever with his sad music, his words that don’t attempt to prettify’ – Jordi Llavina, Avui

‘We already know that literature is a fight to the death with death, but it is a long while since I read a book in which this truth was so visible. So terrifyingly visible, I would say’ – Javier Cercas, El País