Nabi (signed by Elizabeth Gili)

2001, Joan Gili's translation of Josep Carner's classic Catalan poem

Author

Josep Carner, translated from Catalan by J L Gili, Catalan text edited by Jaume Coll, preface by Jonathan Gili, introduction by Arthur Terry, acknowledgements by Elizabeth Gili.

Publisher

Anvil Press Poetry, London, 2001

Printing Details

First UK paperback edition. 21.5 × 14cm, 119pp, text in Catalan and English.

Signed and dedicated by Elizabeth Gili, "To Jacinta [Castillejo], with my love and in memory of my beloved Joan, Elizabeth, 3.04.07". Joan Gili was Carner’s most important English champion. He was a Catalan exile, an antiquarian bookseller and founder of the Dolphin Book Company in Oxford, as well as being the primary translator of Carner's work into English. He married Elizabeth in 1938

Written by the Catalan poet Josep Carner (1884–1970) while he was in exile in Mexico during the early 1940s, Nabi is considered one of the masterpieces of 20th-century Catalan literature. Based on the Biblical story of Jonah, it is essentially a Christian poem, though it is scathing about the effects of religious perversion. In the widest sense a poem about the limits of rationality, it is a triumph of language—of the Catalan language that Carner helped to establish as a vehicle for serious poetry.