Restitution of Joan Alcover

In the context of the centenary of the death of the poet Joan Alcover, one of the key anniversaries of 2026 along with the Clementina Arderiu Year and the Blai Bonet Year, Edicions 62 is releasing the complete and critical edition of his Poems Edited by Ignasi Moreta, who traces the circumstances of the texts' composition, offers a useful critical interpretation, provides metrical and rhythmic details, and, to top off a continuous masterclass, comments on possible variations in previous editions. What a compendium! We are faced with a fundamental, extremely important work that establishes, organizes, clarifies, structures, and brings together, as never before, the corpus of Alcover's Catalan-language production.

Joan Alcover emerges as an unquestionable figure in our tradition because he is the author of extraordinary poems such as 'La reliquia' and 'Desolació,' some of the most brutal compositions in our literature. It is a shame, then, that contemporary young figures shamelessly usurp titles for their psycho-emotional pornography offerings… Without a doubt, Alcover surpasses any rival because he is a dazzling verbal creator who knew how to fuse the power of his landscapes, both experiential and moral, with the traumatic pain of cataclysmic, formidable elegies that are first-rate aesthetic experiences. In his perfect verses, he pioneers authentic strategies of alchemical transformation, like those described by Carl Gustav Jung in famous essays, which confirm that writing can transform overwhelming wounds into symbolic gold without ever sugarcoating the evil. The author, at the same time, offers pieces that are perhaps not so well known but equally radiant, such as the pearl of unsettling sensuality that is 'The Mermaid', which presents a magnetic idyll between a fisherman and the most fascinating and destabilizing aquatic mythological being.

This excellent critical edition of the Poems, Joan Alcover's edition, edited by Ignasi Moreta for Edicions 62, puts an end to a historical deficiency and definitively places the poet in his rightful place, not as a figure of dubious location and difficult to fit into the conceptual framework of the Mallorca School, but rather as a central classic of the canon of Catalan literature, readable today, challenging and moving and inviting to write, as demonstrated by some figures who have embraced him and defended and perpetuated his legacies: Maria Antònia Perelló Femenía, Biel Mesquida and Josep Lluís Aguiló, to cite some cases that I find difficult to refute.