Maria Antònia Salvà

In a magnificent poem, worthy of inclusion in any anthology of Catalan poetry -any one of those anthologies that, after a certain point, have almost systematically ignored her work- Maria Antònia Salvà evokes the ferocious, surprising capacity for survival of a cactus. As tends to be the case with many of her poems, behind the description of country life or a landscape is the suggestion, as Llompart said, of "an imperceptible symbolic sense, hazy and barely insinuated". I cannot read, then, the ten verses of the aforementioned collection without this symbolic sense being forcefully present and, perhaps beyond the conscious intentions of the Mallorcan poet, they become for me a kind of allegory of the woman writer whom, in a memorable book, Tillie Olsen called a "survivor". First, is the simple fact that Salvà should have picked up her pen and stood up against the silence that has been assigned to the female sex through the ages. Hence her "monstrous" side, which is to say her susceptibility to being revealed in her exceptional nature or strangeness. She is like the cactus, a desert plant, "monstrous retile of speckled skin, of clammy entrails", adapted to a hostile environment, "drinking up the sunlight" in a corner until "its malice awakened, twisting and turning it cracked the pot". Second, Maria Antònia Salvà might be seen as a survivor because, for all the traditional difficulty of making known the immense majority of works written by women, with some effort and foraging around in second-hand bookshops, potential readers -men and women- who are interested and are sufficiently tenacious can find her work. And if their pleasure in poetry is not yet blunted, they will discover a good number of poems that deserve to be rescued from this condescending semi-oblivion to which they seem to have been condemned. In this regard, too, her fortune seems to resemble that of the cactus which, having been dumped on a dry wall "beyond the orchard, out of sight", is capable of opening up a way "through hard stones, / digging down through chinks and seams" and, with ferocious effort, managing to be a survivor.

I have said "survivor" and, significantly, this same word in English and in plural form, Survivors, is what Sam Abrams chose as the title for his bilingual anthology of Catalan women poets, which was published by the Institute of North-American Studies a few years ago. Maria Antònia Salvà is not only one of the poets whose work appears, but also she is the one who heads the selection. This, in fact, is because here we have the first major woman bard in the history of Catalan poetry. Before her, in Catalan, there had hardly been any poetic expression at all of the way women experienced the world and things, the peculiar point of view that imparts, at least, a different involvement in reality and history, experience transformed into rhythm and sense through a woman's word. Certainly it would be totally unjust to overlook earlier contributions: the meagre collection of samples of anonymously written medieval poetry or that which was signed (with names from Constança de Mallorca to Tecla de Borja), or the undeniable but difficult-to-extricate female contribution to folk poetry and, to go still further, the verses of women who participated in the literary competition of the Jocs Florals and in the cultural renaissance movement of the Renaixença.

Hence, by the nineteenth century, the name of "pioneer" would unquestionably suit Josepa Massanès (Tarragona 1811 - Barcelona 1887), which is not to ignore a whole series of less illustrious names, for example Emília Sureda, a poet and close friend of Salvà who died prematurely in 1904, or other key names that have, however, shone more brightly in other genres, which is the case of Dolors Monserdà. Nonetheless, if, as I have said, it would be unjust to forget all these precursors, it would also be unjust to pass over the qualitative leap that the publication of Maria Antònia Salvà's first book Poesies (Poems) meant in 1910. It is worth noting that its literary significance was immediately grasped and emphasised by such exigent writers and critics as Continue reading...