One of the most outstanding poetry books within the work of Maria Antònia Salvà is Espigues en flor, written from her little kingdom of Allapassa.
Good health, oh field, oh name of S'Allapassa,
Sweet place, where our race
Has had its home for five-hundred years.
My song today will bless the earth
Of your ploughed fields, made by the ploughshares
Of our forefathers, who God has taken to their rest.
[...]
Here our feelings are not comforted
Nor do our minds soar, but rather there is the shelter
Of the peace of a pleasing austerity.
The song is humble, like a lark;
Your air gains scent in the night
From rosemary and thyme.
Summer gives us grains and fruit,
Christmas rings with sheep bells,
Easter is full with lilies in flower.
The honey from your bees is sweet and red
And the curlew's song is beautiful
Through the night, under the canopy of the stars.
How great is the world! We cannot see the end...
Thickets, rocky ground... Groves
Where hares and rabbits hide out.
Beyond there are no houses:
Groups of pines, scraps of tended land
Roasted by the sun...
"Poema de l'Allapassa" Espigues en flor, 1926
Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by Laia Martinez Lopez.
(Palma, 1869 – Llucmajor, 1958). A poet and translator, Salvà spent long periods at the family estate in l’Allapassa, on the coast of the region of Llucmajor. It was Miquel Costa i Llobera who encouraged her to publish her work when she began to write poetry. Through her friendship with Miquel Ferrà in 1904 she broke with her isolation and met Carner and Guerau de Liost, amongst other writers. In 1926 she published Espigues en flor (Sprigs in bloom), an expanded version of the 1910 edition, which was followed by other collections: El retorn (The return, 1934), Llepolies i joguines (Sweets and toys, 1946) Cel d’horabaixa (Afternoon sky) and Lluneta de pagès (Peasant moon), which together with her memoirs Entre el record i l’enyorança (Between memory and yearning), were also published as her complete works. Her Viatge a Orient (Journey to the East), unpublished until 1998, was the first travelogue written by a female Catalan writer. Her work as a translator is worthy of mention. Salvà’s poetry is conditioned by the desire to follow the learned tradition (such as Verdaguer and Costa) as well as a popular tradition (Majorcan oral poetry), and has the principal themes of everyday life, the landscape, and also religion. Maria Antònia Salvà has been revived from the oblivion and clichés where she languished, and lately her work has been deservedly revisited.
On Llucmajor’s immense coast, in days gone by always on the lookout for attacks by pirate, punished by sun and drought, there is l’Allapassa, a refuge for people who give order to the landscape, in the noucentista sense, to get the most out of it.
The region of Llucmajor is the largest on Majorca, and there are still large estates, especially towards the coast, with names harking back to an earlier age such as Gomera, Tolleric, Capocorb and Cugulutx. S'Allapassa is an archetype of these large estates that meet the cliffs facing the sea. Its owners spent long periods there, and in a few cases lived there permanently, in a type of patriarchal society where everybody had their own clearly defined role and status. The year was marked by the farmer's year, and journeys to town were limited to a few fixed dates. Life was led amongst the pines, wild olives and kermes oaks where sheep, mares and pigs would graze.
