Description

"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."

-Sharon Dolin

"At this particular darkening hour in Europe, we are graced by Cyrus Cassells's homage to Salvador Espriu. A survivor of Spain's civil war, who then became an internal migr , Espriu intimately knew the cost of war and destruction. In exquisite, moving poems such as Sinera Cemetery, masterfully rendered by Cassells, we encounter Espriu's grieved, but resolute, fortitude: 'Liberty, the enduring word I utter time and again/between ancient boundaries/of vineyards and the sea.' Cassells's dialogue with Espriu is a gift, an enactment of the sacred pledge to uphold, against all odds, the 'enduring word.'"

-Ellen Hinsey, author of The Illegal Age

and Update on the Descent

"To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu is a triumph of affinities, a testament to a translator's steady, slow-burning attention to a poet's work-and to the rich metamorphoses sparked by such devotion. These charged, luminous translations exalt Espriu's stark lyrics; not just accompanying but also communicating with them, Cassells's own poems are contemplative and ecstatic. Every translation is a conversation, and I'm grateful for this book as an example of both how and why."

-Robin Myers, translator of Copy by Dolores Dorantes

and Another Life by Daniel Lipara

"Cyrus Cassells has translated more than the words of Salvador Espriu, a Catalan poet who survived what Franco wanted to bury. His translation brings a culture, a time, and an honoring of the duende that gave inner life to a 'sacramental duty' of bringing Espriu to the English language and the world poetic psyche. His own poems inspired by Espriu: 'I became all poetry, / all silence and verse--' are, I might say, transfigurations of exile in a native land. This book is masterful and rare in its beauty. A must read for all that value freedom and the everlasting life of a cypress."

-Lisha Adela Garc a,

Literary translator and author of

Blood Rivers and A Rope of Luna