MIQUEL MARTÍ I POL

More tenaciously than ever, I strive to grow
Knowing that you grow with me: projects,
dreams, desires, take flight
For you and with you, no matter how distant they seem,
And with you and for you I’d fulfill the dream.
I’ll keep you near in the small things
And it is in them that I think of you and you are evoked,
Sure as ever that the only hope
to survive is to love strongly enough
To convert everything we do in life
and increase hope and beauty.*

The poet Miquel Martí i Pol, born in 1929 in Roda de Ter (Barcelona) and who said goodbye to life in Vic (Barcelona) in 2003, has always been dreamt of and sung by for several generations now. The teenager who began working in the offices of the textile factory where his mother was employed, once suffered from tuberculosis and mitigated his convalescence with excellent mana: reading.

A few years later, he would not stop writing, making uo verses translating the greatest ones. In 1954, his first work, “Paraules al vent” (‘Words to the Wind’) is published and also gives him his first award, the Óssa Menor. Coming later on prolifically were “El Poble” (‘People’), “Vint-i-set poemes en tres temps” (‘Twenty-Seven Poems in Three Periods’), “Estimada Marta” (‘Dear Marta’), “L ‘àmbit de tots els àmbits” (‘The Field of the Fields’), both winning the Critics Award and the Ciutat de Barcelona one, respectively, and other essential works in contemporary poetry. Thus, almost a hundred cities and towns’ streets and squares are nowadays dedicated to his talent and his ability to make people feel and think about public issues and privacy ones.

One of the most read and beloved Catalan poets, he also had the pleasure of translating Saint-Exupéry, Simone de Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Apollinaire, Zola or Racine, among many other writers.

His extensive work is also known in many languages and countries, who have embraced, regardless of culture, the universal themes of Martí i Pol’s poetry, noticeable in the following quotes and verses. Artists like Maria del Mar Bonet or Lluís Llach have also put music to part of his work:

 

The people are my effort and your effort,
My voice and your voice,
My little death and your little death.

Everything is to be done and everything is possible.

We will be whatever we wish to be.

Love and live every moment in things. The colours are not repeated.

The boss in you is you, and not some other wind.

All roads are good to make way.
But our mission is to speak.
To bring light of word
To the unspecific things.
Raise them to the light with the arms of the living expression
Because we succeed in them.
All this, of course, not living too close to things.
Anyone will deny that the task is not arduous.

It is therefore only for love we are grown
Roses in our fingers and the mysteries are revealed;
And in love everything is right and necessary.

Fear not, reach out and welcome a handful of the water full of light this evening.

I wish you the most placid season holidays,

Álex Rovira

*All Martí i Pol texts’ translations are free and unofficial.