Passwords: Cyrus Cassells on Salvador Espriu

Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) was Catalan Spain’s leading contender for the Nobel Prize. Before the Spanish Civil War, he was a literary prodigy in fiction. When Franco came to power and banned the Catalan language from public use, Espriu turned almost exclusively to poetry and plays. As he struggled to preserve his censored language and culture, his work achieved a spare intensity and a bare-bones beauty, reminiscent of Beckett. Cyrus Cassells will read from his own translations and from Magda Bogin’s Selected Poems of Salvador Espriu.