Poet Lluís Alpera buried in Alicante yesterday

Yes­ter­day Lluís Alpera was buried in Al­i­cante. He was one of the vet­er­ans of Cata­lan po­etry in Va­len­cia and the founder of the De­part­ment of Cata­lan Philol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Al­i­cante. Born in Va­len­cia dur­ing an ag­gres­sive bomb raid car­ried out by Franco’s troops in 1938, Alpera was a de­ci­sive fig­ure in Cata­lan po­etry from the 50s to the pre­sent day, as well as being im­por­tant for the con­sol­i­da­tion of the lan­guage in the south­ern-most re­gions of the lin­guis­tic do­main.

Alpera’s po­etry is a po­etry of great con­trasts, of cross­roads, brim­ming over with sen­su­al­ity. We could say that he is the most abrupt, lyri­cal and ir­re­press­ible of the poets who fol­lowed in Vi­cent Andrés Es­tellés’ wake.

Ex­actly one year ago, the pub­lisher Onada Edi­cions re­leased a col­lec­tion of his po­etry from 1963 to 2017 in Ulisses i la Mar dels Sar­gas­sos (Ulysses and the Sar­gasso Sea), an ex­tra­or­di­nary ad­ven­ture that the Al­i­cante poet him­self com­pared to the fa­mous Odyssey.

Alpera was in­flu­enced by Es­priu, Qua­si­modo, Car­les Riba and Ausiàs March, be­fore his vi­sion evolved to take on the sen­su­al­ism of Joanot Mar­torell, which, along with his own pas­sion­ate dy­namism, was to pro­duce one of the most provoca­tive voices of Cata­lan po­etry. And like most Cata­lan au­thors, he wasn’t given enough recog­ni­tion.