The power and glory of Antònia Arbona

The philologist, writer and translator Antònia Arbona publishes her sixteenth book of poems at Documenta Balear, Power and gloryA sophisticated meta-literary epic that engages with Catalan icons (the clear presence of Josep M. Llompart and Blai Bonet is essential) and universal writers (William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, Graham Greene). It is accompanied by some twenty paratexts, including prologues, epilogues, and commentaries by Pere Perelló i Nomdedéu, M. Magdalena Gelabert i Miró, Sebastià Bennasar Llobera, Gabriel Janer Manila, Pep Siset, Nicolás Dols, Miguel Cardell, Cristina Álva Sureda, and Martí. The cover illustration is by Israel Clarà.

Power and glory, Antonia Arbona's work can be read as a celebration of the power of literature when it is capable of saving destroyed lives, as a savage confession in verses that adopt different rhythmic and metrical forms, as a brutal stripping away in which terrible truths come to light, as a cry of denunciation against the Llunàtic corruption, as an explicit account of the violent situations the author has had to endure under the pressure of a series of men who have tried to abuse her… For all these reasons, it is a book that strikes and shakes the reader to their core, from every level of interpretation, and Arbona arrives at the epiphanic certainty that every creative act can become a psychomagical miracle of alchemy in which manure is transformed into gold. It is from this transmuting power that the poet subverts the miseries she has suffered to sublimate them into an ambitious and colossal poetic work.

Both Blai Bonet and Pier Paolo Pasolini, or even the Marquis de Sade, would have agreed with Antònia Arbona regarding the surgically precise reflections she offers through furious pages that never lose their perfect tone or precise expression when describing power, which corrupts and tyrannizes. Although the poetic voice often expresses doubt and explicitly states that she doesn't understand how she has been able to endure so much ignominy, in the end it is confirmed that glory is only destined for courageous souls who, like Antonia Arbona, do not remain silent in the face of adversity and create against all odds, as demonstrated by a filmmaker also mentioned in the volume, Jes Franco.