Spain, Sinera and Sepharad in the artistic space of Salvador Espriu's collection “La pell de brau”

This article examines the 20th century Catalan poet Salvador Espriu’s poetry collection “La pell de brau” (1960), which incorporates themes outlined in his previous poetry cycle of five books. In his first collection of poems, Espriu introduces the reader to the fictional Sinera, its prototype is the Mediterranean Catalan town where the poet’s father and mother were born. A symbol of an idealized past and a homeland, Sinera is an observable, limited space, marked by the sea, mountains, vineyards and olive trees. The poet who glorified his native land-Mediterranean Catalonia-in the book “Cemetery of Sinera” speaks fondly of his home country in the collection “La pell de brau” referring to Spain and the Iberian peninsula, which in this book is called Sepharad (the name of the peninsula given by the Jews who settled there many centuries ago and created the unique culture of medieval Andaluda together with the Moors and Spaniards). The author expresses the hope that the younger generation will wipe the bloody trail left by the civil war from its “trampled skin” and build the future of Sepharad on the principles of respect for the history, culture and languages of the different peoples who lived and keep on living on this territory. The collection under analysis combines fictional, real or historic cities and countries in a single artistic space, underlining the poet’s idea of the value and equality of the cultures of Spain, Sepharad and other real and symbolic regions of the world.