La pell de brau

The title of this book alludes to the comparison by the Greek geographer Strabo of the map of the Iberian Peninsula to a bull hide hung up to dry. Yet the most important point of influence on the work is Jewish: the use of the term ‘Sepharad’ to refer to Spain, or, more precisely, Iberia. This was the word used by the Jews who had been expelled from Spain in the wake of the decree issued by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492 to refer to their lost land. The word also figures in a biblical context: the location of the struggle between the brothers Jacob and Esau. The term is, then, rich in association: the notion of a war between brothers and, as an overarching image, the analogy between the peoples of Israel and of Catalonia.

Espriu had already explored this affinity imaginatively and powerfully in Primera història d’Esther, but in La pell de brau the point of reference is broader. This was the work that first brought him to the attention of a public outside Catalonia. It was translated twice into Spanish in the 1960s and remains to this day the most translated of all Espriu's books of poetry. The year of its publication was, moreover, something of a watershed in the movement against the regime in Catalonia. When Franco visited Barcelona in May 1960 he was subjected to a demonstration at a concert in the Palau de la Mùsica when members of the audience rose to their feet to sing the Catalan national anthem. Among those detained after the protest, although he was not at the concert himself, was Jordi Pujol, who had been responsible for drafting a clandestine leaflet which had been circulated in advance of Franco's visit. It attacks the dictator because of the oppression and corruption of his regime; it refers to the way in which intellectual and cultural life has been blighted by censorship; it claims that the rights of working people have been removed. Franco's government is ‘rotundament antisocial’ [emphatically antisocial], the result of concentrating power in an omnipotent leader: ‘En definitiva, tot el poder radica en les mans d’un sol home, el que ara pensa venir a Barcelona, que té pel poble i per les seves aspiracions un menyspreu absolut …’