Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets

During the post-civil war era, General Francisco Franco’s fascist government forbade the people of Spain’s Catalonia region from speaking, reading, and writing in Catalan, a crime punishable by imprisonment or execution. Throughout these years, the work of Catalan poets could only be found via the underground. Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve traveled to meet each of the poets featured in this anthology, embarking on the long road of joy, pain, and friendship that is the work of translation. These fourteen poets, like fourteen blackbirds, provide keen angles of perception in beautiful and lyrical poetry, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes nostalgic, and always engaging, until now almost entirely unknown to U.S readers.