Chronologies

The unity of the first five complete collections Espriu published between 1946 and 1955 is obvious; there is no need for recourse to any esoteric or cabbalistic scheme to discover this. Castellet refers to their ‘rara construcció simètrica’ [unusual symmetrical construction], forming as they do a pattern that is chiastic or palindromic in nature: the first and last of the cycle have 30 poems each, the second and fourth, both divided into three parts, 44 poems, and the central, third book has 30 poems. In summary we have: 30 − 44 − 40 − 44 − 30. Delor i Muns observes that the total number of poems from these five books is 188, and, in accordance with her theory regarding Espriu's distinctive numerological preoccupation, reduces this by successive addition to 8: 1 + 8 + 8 = 17; 1 + 7 = 8. Eight is the cabbalistic number of perfection, but also of death, and on that basis appropriate in the light of Espriu's observation that his work was ‘una meditació de la mort’. It is possible that Delor i Muns is over-zealous in her numerological interpretation of other details in these books, but it is perhaps significant that Espriu himself specifically cited the number 188 in the preface he supplied to a bilingual edition of his poetry.

Establishing exactly when Espriu determined the structure of the cycle is, however, a more complicated matter. It may have been as late as 1954, the year before the final book, Final del laberint, was written and published, that the precise shape was determined. Before completing the second book in the sequence, Les hores, between April and November 1954 by writing the 12 poems that comprise the third and final part of this collection, Espriu had explicitly in place the 30 poems of the first book, the 32 of the first two parts of the second, the 40 of the third and the 44 of the recently completed fourth. These admittedly constitute the majority of the 188 poems of the cycle, but do not between them hint at the clear symmetrical pattern that was to emerge.