Poet
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Miquel Palol 1953-... country: Spain language: Catalan |
is the latest in a line of well-known poets. His great-grandfather was a Romantic poet, his grandfather a Symbolist. He himself has already won many awards for his work, poetry as well as prose. He writes poems in a rich variety of styles, using many different registers, from baroque, labyrinthine sentence structures to colloquial speech. Miquel de Palol (Barcelona, 1953) lived in Valladolid until he was seventeen, when he returned to his native city. Although he grew up outside Catalonia, he has always published in Catalan, the language of his parents, of his grandfather, the poet, novelist and playwright Miquel de Palol, and his great-grandfather, the poet Pere de Palol. Miquel de Palol published his first collection of poems, Delta, when he was twenty and studying to become an architect. In 1982 he received the ‘Carles Riba’, Catalonia’s most important poetry prize, for his collection El Porxo de les Mirades (The Arcade of Glances). For the same collection he was awarded the ‘Crítica Serra d’Or’ in 1984. Miquel de Palol published thirteen volumes of poetry before his first novel saw the light: El Jardí dels Set Crepuscles (The Garden of the Seven Twilights, 1989). It has won almost every prize awarded for novels written in Catalan, and has been translated into Spanish, Dutch, German and Italian. Since then this prolific author has produced nine more novels, one in collaboration with Xavier Moret, three collections of short stories, one in collaboration with Maria de la Pau Janer, a ‘divertimento in prose’, three volumes of poetry and an anthology of his poems in a bilingual, Catalan-Spanish, edition. His latest novel, El Troiacord, published in 2002, is an undertaking comparable in size (five volumes comprising over 1300 pages), ambition and complexity to his much-acclaimed first novel. So far, two of Miquel de Palol’s novels, El jardí de les set crepuscles and Igur Neblí have appeared in Dutch translation. Love and self-sacrifice on the one hand, and ambition and treachery on the other, are the two poles of the world he evokes in his novels. The ‘basso continuo’ of his prose work is the arbitrary exercise of power. Characteristic of Miquel de Palol’s poetry is its stylistic variety, its use of widely different registers, from baroque, labyrinthine sentence structures to everyday speech, conjuring up imaginary as well as starkly realistic worlds. Wisdom won from personal experience, and recollection as a structuring and motivating life force are thematic constants in the poetry of Miquel de Palol. Author: Frans Oosterholt Translated by Ko Kooman Delta (1973); Quan (1979); Encara Mor Aquella Primavera (1981);El Porxo de les Mirades(1983); Rapsòdies de Montcada (1983); Indiferència (1986); La Nit Italiana (1986); lgur Nebli (1994); Nombra y Tendrás, Antología Bilingüe (1995); El Sol i la Mort (1996); Gralles al Galliner (1996); El Troiacord (2002). Poets: |
