El saltamartí / The Tumbler

Joan Brossa (trans. Cameron Griffiths)

In The Tumbler, traditional poetic stanzas sit side-by-side with a more liberated poetic form – one Brossa referred to as a synthetic poetry – in which he employs a straightforward, everyday language (it is the language of the working classes with which he identifies). Always the innovator, Brossa reinvigorates this language so as to evince an accessible and archly political poetry that demands our critical and creative participation. Challenging the very notion of an author’s hold over these texts, Brossa invites us to approach these works with a critical autonomy all of our own, and The Tumbler stands a critical study of freedom. The poet places himself as a critic of established power systems, accepted meanings and held conceptualizations of liberty. His movement towards an aesthetic autonomy (a journey we can charter from his early books on) arrived at its final destination in a complete break with language – his visual poetry – and in this collection we encounter this mixture of verse and visual poems for the first time. An examination of poetic license that proves as pertinent today as it did upon its first publication.

Due to the book’s anti-Franco sentiments – and Brossa’s distinct support of the Catalan independence movement—both the first and second Catalan editions of The Tumbler suffered due to censorship. Publishers of the first Castilian translation released only a selection of works from the manuscript due to the political implications of this poetry (leaving out 50 poems in total), and the lion’s share of Brossa’s bibliography remains untranslated. Cameron Griffiths’ new translation is the most extensive English language publication of Brossa’s poetry to date.