Bierville Elegies
The Bierville Elegies is the most outstanding work by the Catalan poet Carles Riba. Once Riba and his family embarked on the path of exile in France towards the end of the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, they settled first in the and there, between March and July 1939, what would later become the Elegies began to take shape. Riba continued the work between July 1939 and June 1940 in L'Isle-Adam, then for eight months in Bordeaux. The Elegies reached their final form in Montpellier, where Riba settled. Along with Nabí by Josep Carner and Antigone by Salvador Espriu, the Elegies of Bierville constitute one of the great works of modern Catalan literature and the prime post-civil-war pieces marked by the political situation.
Written between 1939 and 1942, the Elegies were published in Barcelona after a year in an edition that bore the imprint of Buenos Aires and the date 1942; this edition was shortened, however. In 1949 in Santiago, Chile, the first complete edition of the work appeared, but the distance between Chile and Catalonia meant that this work remained unknown to the Catalan public. Finally, the complete edition came out in 1951 in Barcelona and quickly made a big impact.
In the Elegies the poet melds three very different realities, which are fostered by loneliness and lack of history of the landscape of Bierville and become almost legendary:
- the poet's self,
- that of his people, and
- a common homeland of Greece, to which the poet is now traveling, now that he is not in his own homeland