Lots of poetic activities scheduled for Barcelona's 2022 event. Below is a link that sets out schedules and other information in Catalan and Spanish. Exploration is the word, however, and the website is very well set up.
https://www.barcelona.cat/barcelonapoesia/
I first posted the poem below, a translation, to celebrate Barcelona's Poetry Week 2018. The original is Joan Timoneda's "Só
qui só, from the version sung by
Raimon. As will be obvious it's a love poem/song. It can be found on YouTube among other places.
Wikipedia has
information about Timoneda (~1518-1583) but as far as I can see only in
Catalan and Spanish, although it should be easy enough to get that translated. So Happy Poetry Day---taking poetry in the ample sense of creative activity! The poem and translation:
Virginia Woolf and war – an homage to Virginia Woolf and to #breakthebias
The writing of Virginia Woolf was bound to touch on the effects of war. She lived through both the first and second world war as well as the Boer war. As a pacifist, Woolf wrote against war and other violent situations, including, obviously, gender violence. In Mrs Dalloway, as I have written before, there is a basic duality established between Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway that reminds us of the suffering we’re currently seeing in world conflicts, not only in Ukraine. In the novel one protagonist is privileged, a person of means; the other, an ex-soldier who survives World War I, is unemployed, of penurious means. Poet and society matron. Male and female. Simplifying in this way is one way of coming to understandings of the ideas running through the book. And as always in Woolf there is highly careful planning behind the writing. But two other binary opposites, sane/insane, are of use here, especially as Woolf herself made use of them as she planned the book.
Repetition of some of these words sets the novel to navigate around truth versus insane truth… At the same time the writing establishes doubt—the region of beauty, as Woolf terms it in the essay ‘Reading’—about the acuteness of Septimus Smith’s psychological trauma. Smith, the character, representative of so many people trapped in wars, may or may not be insane. But obviously the insanity of war makes up a great part of the writer’s societal indictment. But underlying the text is a fascinating use of suggestion woven in through the aforementioned series of key words or ideas as the personal perspectives of the book’s characters become clear through their thoughts and conversations.
Given the world situation today, let us hope we can grow less violent and definitely break the bias!
