Les cançons d’Ariadna

In 1949, exactly midway between the appearance of Cementiri de Sinera and Les hores, Espriu published the first edition of Les cançons d’Ariadna, a collection of 33 poems that bore as indicative dates of composition March 1944 to January 1946. In the definitive edition of the poetry, however, this collection had grown to 100 poems, dated 1934–1980. The stages of growth dated mainly from the last decade of Espriu's life: the second edition (1973) contained 68 poems, the third (1977), 88, the fourth (1979), 89, and the fifth and final edition 100 (1981). Yet it was not merely a matter of accumulation: some poems that had appeared in earlier editions were not included in later ones, as was the case with the poem entitled ‘L’onze de setembre de 1714’ (OC, II, 221), which was eventually included in the first section of Per a la bona gent.

Delor has suggested that the date of each revision of Les cançons d’Ariadna is historically significant, although her conclusions are not entirely convincing. For example, she postulates that the dates relating to the composition of the poems that formed the first edition (March 1944 to January 1946) correspond to the end of the Second World War, yet this is a period of nearly two years that begins before D-Day, and extends to nearly six months beyond the Japanese surrender. Again, it is a moot point whether the event that is supposed to trigger the fourth edition of 1979 – the publication of an article on the Catalan language and questions of nationality in Els Marges and the discussion that it provoked – is of a comparable historical significance.

The collection is not a coherent one in the same way as is each of the eight books beginning with Cementiri de Sinera and ending with Setmana Santa. Yet, it would be unusual for Espriu to create a work that did not possess some kind of structural or numerological rationale and, as Miralles has demonstrated, this is also the case with Les cançons d’Ariadna. He suggests a tripartite distribution, mainly by theme or topic, into as near an equal allocation as the equation could permit: 33, 33 and 34. If, as seems likely, this is what Espriu intended, then it constitutes another allusion or homage to Dante, as the three parts of his Divine Comedy have a nearly identical structure.