MARGARITA BALLESTER (Barcelona, 1942)
Poet and history teacher. She 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 (1989) (The Infant and Death) 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). 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).
Margarita Ballester uses powerful and suggestive images, frequently looking through the gaze of the other arts in order to shape her own creation that is founded on the word. She lives on the island of Minorca, where she teaches and continues to work on her poetry, which, for these times, is of exceptional intensity.
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SELECTED WORKS
· L’infant i la mort
(Columna, 1989) [‘The Infant and Death’].
· El ulls
(Columna, 1995; Bromera, 2001) [‘Eyes’].
· Entre dues espases
(Emboscall, 2004) [‘Between Two Swords’].
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LATEST WORKS IN TRANSLATION
ENGLISH
· Survivors: Abelló, Anglada, Arderiu, Ballester, Fuster, Leveroni, Marçal, Pessarrodona, Salvà [Anthology], tr. D. Sam Abrams. Barcelona: Institut of north American Studies, 1991.
· Poetry in the Balearic Islands at the end of the millenium [Anthology], tr. Estelle Henry-Bossonney. Palma de Mallorca: Documenta Balear, 2003.
FRENCH
· La Poésie aux Baléares à la fin du millénaire [Anthology], Jean-Marie Barberà, Annie Bats & Christian Camps. Montpellier: Publications de Montpellier 3, 2002.
GALICIAN
· O escaravello dourado [L’escarabat daurat], tr. Mª do Carme Hermida. Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco, 1993.
HUNGARIAN
· Ész és mámor. Századi katalán költok [Anthology], tr. Balázs Déri. Budapest: Íbisz, 1997.
RUSSIAN
· Vremia vernikh zerkal. Dvadtsat katalonskih poetess XX stoletia [Anthology], tr. Elena Zernova. Sant Petersburg: universitét, 2001.
· 40 poslie 39 [Anthology], tr. Elena Zernova. Sant Petersburg: Sankt Petersburgskogo universiteta, 2002.
SPANISH
· He decidido seguir viviendo... [Anthology], tr. José Bru & Jorge Souza. Mexico: universidad de guadalajara, 2004.
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