Margarita Ballester

LA DIMENSIÓ VEGETAL DEL TEMPS

Language: catalan

Translations: german (DIE PFLANZLICHE DIMENSION DER ZEIT), english (THE VEGETAL DIMENSION OF TIME)

LA DIMENSIÓ VEGETAL DEL TEMPS

La mort s’atura sobre meu;
no m’esparvera, cau més aviat
dins l’àmbit de la nosa.
I s’escola la vida sobrant
de moltes hores, marge avall,
i creix la mort als arbres
que sobreviuen a casa pròpia.
Ressona, en el meu cap, la dimensió
vegetal del temps que no viuré
ni escriuran per nosaltres:
el temps de les tortugues
i els bibliòfils.

Margarita Ballester

photo © Institut Ramon Llull

* 30.11.1941, Barcelona, Spain
lives in: Minorca, Spain

Margarita Ballester was born in Barcelona in 1942. She is a poet and history teacher.

Ballester completed an Arts degree in Barcelona and subsequently lived in Madrid and Paris. To use a cliché, it might be said that this is a writer who has come into her own with maturity. However, it is also true that, although she published her first works after turning forty, her poetry has continued to grow with time, thanks to her extremely demanding work as her own harshest critic. Hence, after publishing some early poems in the review Reduccions, her first book, L'infant i la mort (The Infant and Death, 1989) was published and was awarded the Rosa Leveroni Prize. Catalan critics celebrated the appearance of this new voice but the author continued working at her own pace until 1995, when the publication of her work Els ulls (Eyes) meant that she would thereafter be seen as a key Catalan poet. Some ten years later, in 2004, she published her hitherto latest work, Entre dues espases (Between Two Swords), translated into Spanish by Luisa Antolín Villota (Ediciones Vitrubio: Madrid, 2011). It garnered the prestigious Josep Maria Llompart-Cavall Verd Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (Association of Catalan Language Writers). Her work has appeared in different anthologies into English, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

photo © Institut Ramon Llull

Ballester lives on the island of Minorca, where she teaches and continues to work on her poetry.

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