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.
