Jordi Llavina’s Poetry & Prose Blurs the Lines Between Reality and Fiction, Writer and Reader

The author's unusual style allows readers to “write” the text along with him.

Poetry & Prose, by Jordi Llavina, translated from Catalan by William Hamilton, is a stunning collection of, as the title suggests, poetry and prose. The book opens with one astounding long-form poem—its English translation parallel to the original Catalan—and ends with an equally beautiful short prose piece. Themes of memory, time, and nature are prevalent in both, and Llavina’s lyricism flows effortlessly throughout the whole collection. Poetry & Prose—as well as the only other publication of Llavina’s work in English, London Under Snow—makes clear that this award-winning writer is an expert at blurring the lines between reality and fiction, and bringing reader and writer closer together than ever.

Poetry & Prose begins with Llavina’s breathtaking poem “The Hermitage,” its lines recounting one man’s climb up a long, dusty hill to visit the hermitage perched at the top. This climb is not just a physical journey, but a journey through the past in which the narrator revisits memories through Llavina’s brilliant imagery. Speaking at Sant Jordi NYC 2020, Llavina stated that the opening lines came to mind one day and stood out to him as symbolic of a return to the landscape of his childhood. These initial words and the ideas behind them came to Llavina somewhat naturally, thus leading him to embark on the feat of creating a long-form poem that stemmed from these seeds. Llavina put forth the idea that “[w]hen you have the first lines of the poem, it is easy to begin […] The most important thing is to have the first lines.” These all-important first lines, then, were the key to Llavina’s staggeringly beautiful “The Hermitage”:

Lone I climb once more, years later,
up to Sant Pere’s hermitage.
The air is still, and the glare of
a raw July sun will leave my
neck and shoulders burnt and tender.

The poem is heavy on symbolism, as Llavina weaves boundless allegories into his lines. Emphasizing these symbols and their allegories further, he isolates certain words, detaching them from the main form of the poem and placing them in the margins. In poetry, symbols are, of course, of utmost importance, and in many cases, it is paramount that the reader recognize them. In detaching these important symbols from the body of the poem, the poet makes himself vulnerable to the reader, and the reader is thus permitted to move closer to the poet. This bold technique creates a very intimate reading, allowing the reader a glance into the intricacies of the poet’s mind and prompting a dialogue between the two. While this risks rendering certain symbols and their allegories too overt, Llavina takes a great deal of care with the words he selects. Readers are given vague, ambiguous directions that hold myriad meanings, unknowingly led down the poet’s path, joining him as a spectator on his symbolic journey.

Llavina’s intimate text defies Barthes’ famous statement that “the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the author.” While Barthes may belong to a school of thought that it is in fact the reader who “writes” the text, with the writer simply providing the tools to do so, Llavina certainly does not. Throughout his two works in English, the writer is always there, closing the gap between reality and fiction, not giving the readers the text as a tool to “write” the story, but simply accompanying us, allowing us to “write” the text along with him.

One important symbol in “The Hermitage” that readers encounter with the writer at their side is water. This force of nature quietly ripples beneath Llavina’s lines, but it often bursts to the surface, flooding the poem with compelling allegories:

– a fire can be stopped, but water
(according to the adage) can’t –
and that, once again, taught me a
very valuable lesson:
we are water, hardly a weak
flow of routine water, water
that always must run off downward.
Perhaps, as is oft said, we are
but a dream, yes, a dream that slips
between nothing and the void, a
flow of water, running nowhere,
running out of time, that yearly
rush of each hour and second, in
which we have to do countless tasks
before our bodies shrivel up –
skin, meat and blood, body and soul –
and we’ve not had time to do them.
And thus, in the end, we’re left with
a dried-up stream, an eternal
tomb for the water we once bore
– a water once alive, now dead.

Water thus symbolizes life and death; its constant flow courses through Llavina’s 1,401 lines and acts as a powerful allegory for the passage of time. These strong images of water, and the somewhat arduous allegories they evoke, are offset with more gentle, melancholic lines on nature, softening the blow of Llavina’s existential observations. The forceful, stirring symbol of water culminates in the closing two lines:

Running through a book, like a crack,
the blood of existence flows free.

With the blow of these final lines, the writer and reader’s journey to the hermitage is complete. However, this journey is far from over, as Llavina’s lines in Hamilton’s dazzling translation will almost certainly stay with the reader for a long time yet. Despite its unnerving reflections on life and death, and the use of symbols that evoke big questions and deep reflections, Llavina’s lyricism and long, melodic passages on nature allow “The Hermitage” to remain nostalgic, open, and perhaps even comforting.

Llavina’s presence in his work, and his melancholic lyricism, flows effortlessly into the second and final piece in this collection, “The Pomegranate Tree.” While this story is presented as prose, Hamilton states in his translator’s note that it can be read as poetry:

Jordi’s prose writing does not lend itself to easy translation as it both complex and highly poetic. As such, when translating the story it has been important for me to remember that he is, first and foremost, a poet and that, therefore, the story should be treated as such, despite it being mostly in prose.

“The Pomegranate Tree,” then, could be considered a hybrid of poetry and prose—even more so when we take into account that the story is broken into sections by short poems. With these poetic interruptions, Llavina once again brings the reader just a little closer to the writer, allowing the poems to almost “conclude” and make clear the symbols that have been evoked in the preceding prose—albeit this time in a much more overt and unambiguous way.

Death plays a big part in this ghostly, ethereal story and offers philosophical meditations on the meaning of life, love, and death. Much like “The Hermitage,” this prose piece recounts yet another journey and follows the protagonist, “the wanderer,” on what at first appears to be a hike through the Catalan countryside. However, within “The Pomegranate Tree,” Llavina’s use of tenses tangles the chronology. As “the wanderer” himself states, “his walk […] was not necessarily a journey through space, but rather a journey through time.”

The confusing twists that result from Llavina’s unique and clever use of tenses are further enhanced by drastic changes in seasons, locations, and descriptions of the wanderer. For example, in a reflection of himself, he sees an aging, old man, and in the next—the following day—he is once again fresh-faced and youthful. These contradictory passages lead the reader to question who this mysterious wanderer is, whether he’s dead or alive, real or imagined. While these questions are never resolved—and rightly so—they cause the reader to once more reflect on those all-important symbols of life and death that appeared in “The Hermitage.”

In “The Pomegranate Tree,” Llavina introduces dreams to his experimental style, further blurring the lines between reader and writer, and reality and fiction. With the addition of yet another layer, “The Pomegranate Tree” suddenly becomes a story about an experience that is neither real nor false. While the wanderer began walking in a familiar place, the further he walks, the more clouded his mind grows. His dreams mix with real-life experiences, and the further he walks, the less engaged with his own being, his own mind, and his own memories he becomes. He begins to question not only these memories, but himself and his being:

I started my wanderings to distance myself from the person I once was and that, slowly but surely, over long days, I stopped being. And I don’t yet know who I will become, if I will ever become someone different from who I once was.

“The Pomegranate Tree” explores the border between dreams and reality, fiction and truth, reader and writer. This is reminiscent of lines that appear in the closing pages of Llavina’s short story collection, London Under Snow:

In a story […] everything, absolutely everything is true. […] The moment you tell it, it becomes real, and not only that, it becomes true. It all ends up as being true.

These lines ring true to the themes that appear within both “The Pomegranate Tree,” and “The Hermitage.” It becomes clear that Llavina places great importance in defying the distinction between reality and fiction, not declaring something real and another thing not. Poetry & Prose highlights the deceptions of memories, and the way they push one across the boundary between the imagined and the unimagined.

This collection of poetry and prose, in Hamilton’s careful and precise translation, is breathtaking. Each piece is heavy on symbolism and allegory. Each powerful piece meditates on mankind’s (im)mortality. Nevertheless, both “The Hermitage” and “The Pomegranate Tree” harness a peaceful and melancholic beauty, a beauty which the reader is led through by the writer himself. Perhaps most striking, Llavina doesn’t hesitate to reach out to his readers, to remind them that he is there on this intimidating yet fascinating journey with them. In Poetry & Prose, the birth of the reader is almost certainly not requited by the death of the author and the act of “writing” is something that the author and the reader embark on together.

Alice Banks is a creative and literary translator from French and Spanish based in Madrid. After studying the MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Alice began working with Asymptote Journal as copy editor, and the European Literature Network as an editorial assistant.

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