Joan Margarit (1938-2021) was one of Spain's major modern writers. He worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but over the past four decades became known for his mastery of the Catalan language, and was Spain's most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he translated. He was awarded both the 2019 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honour, and the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry 2019, the most important poetry award in for Spain, Portugal and Latin America. In the much praised Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), Joan Margarit evoked the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, reminding us that it is not death we have to understand but life. In his later collection, Strangely Happy (2011), he builds an architecture of the human spirit out of the unpromising materials of self-doubt, despair and death. In Love Is a Place, which brings together the poems of three recent collections, he finds himself face to face with the prospect of his own death, while rediscovering love. 'Death is the final solitude, ' he writes in 'On the ground', but the image at the end of the poem is one of hope, of love, and of home, not 'the skeleton with the scythe that Dürer engraved' but 'a brightly-lit window in a dark street.' The three collections see him moving from despair to self-knowledge, confronting his old demons with honesty and courage. Love, it seems, is not after all 'hard or far away', nor was the signal lost, because, in the poet's words, 'Love is a place. / It endures beyond everything: from there we come. / And it's the place where life remains.'
Joan Margarit was born in 1938 in Sanauja, La Segarra region, in Catalonia. He is an architect, and from 1968 until his retirement was also Professor of Structural Calculations at Barcelona's Technical School of Architecture. He first published poetry in Spanish, in 1963 and 1965, but after a silence of ten years switched to writing and publishing in Catalan. From 1980 he began to establish his reputation as a leading Catalan poet. As well as publishing many collections in Catalan, he has translated most of his own books into Spanish. Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), the first translation into English of his Catalan poetry, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Strangely Happy, a selection of his later poems, also translated by Anna Crowe, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. A third translation by Anna Crowe of his most recent poetry, Love Is a Place, is due from Bloodaxe in 2016; this includes all the poems from three Catalan collections: No era lluny (It Wasn't Far Away or Difficult, 2010), Es perd el senyal (The Signal Is Fading, 2012) and Estimar es un lloc (From Where to Begin to Love Again, 2014).
