Reseña

Salvà began composing poems in Catalan at the age of fourteen in the midst of the Renaissance and the recovery of the language. She is part of the Escola mallorquina which honoured her for her quality. She continued to write in the midst of the Noucentisme and was granted awards. She never stopped and, then, delved into the symbolist movement together with Carles Riba and Josep Carner, who prefaces the book Espigues en flor (1926). In addition to being a poetess, she successfully translated Mireia (1917) by Nobel laureate Frederic Mistral and works by Italian authors. She also wrote in prose the first travel book written by a woman in Catalan. Nevertheless, she has remained invisible when Catalan literature is taught until now. She is a poetess who "has never ceased to prevail, because she is landscape,  language and identity," as Bel Granya explains.

Actividades

Catalán

• “La petxina” de Maria Antònia Salvà
  • España > Lengua Catalana y Literatura > 4º ESO > Educación literaria
• Quatre coses de l’«Escola Mallorquina»
  • España > Lengua Catalana y Literatura > 4º ESO > Educación literaria

Justificaciones

• Poetic reference of the Renaissance and Escola mallorquina, which transcended, surpassing the model.
• She is a classic author of contemporary Catalan literature.
• Her work was admired and explicitly recognized throughout her career.
• First known writer of a travel book in Catalan .
• Landscape, language and identity are fundamental elements of her work.

Biografía

Maria Antònia Salvà was born in Palma in 1869. Daughter of a family of landowners, she spent the first years in the lands that the family owned in Llucmajor, with her aunts, to whom her father had entrusted her, since her mother died when Maria Antonia was very young. At the age of six, she returned to Palma with her father, who worked as a lawyer, and she studied at Col·legi de la Puresa. The contact with the Mallorcan Renaissance and the friendship with the family of Miquel Costa i Llobera strengthened the literary vocation of the girl who had been writing since she was very young. A very important turning point was the discovery of the poem Canigó by Verdaguer, a work that she knew off by heart and that became a poetic game with her father. Vital and refined, she devoted her life to writing, translating and reading. And to live between Palma and Llucmajor, in the interior of the island, especially in La Llapassa, the manor possession. There, she received numerous visits and wrote a very extensive and valuable epistle with the writers and intellectuals of her time. Her vital daily contact with nature and the vocabulary of the countryside are decisive for understanding her poetry, which she began at the end of the 19th century, under the mastery of Miquel Costa i Llobera.
 
It was in 1907 that she made a trip to the East with Costa Llobera. The poetess captures her impressions of the places she visits (Athens, Constantinople, Patmos, Rhodes, Cyprus, Beirut, Haifa, the Holy Land, Cairo, and Rome) in a notebook entitled Viatge a Orient, a pioneer in travel books written by a woman, but it was not published until 1998.
 
She soon became friends with the young poets Miquel Ferrà and Josep Carner, who became her friends and literary mentors. In 1910, she published the first book Poesies, with a prologue by Costa i Llobera.
 
Josep Carner was a great admirer of the work of Maria Antònia Salvà and made it known in Catalunya, especially with the publication of Mireia, the emblematic work of Frederic Mistral and the Occitan Félibrige. According to Carner, Salvà represents, within the Escola mallorquina —a school that was inspired by the classic Horacean models, and aroused great admiration in the new generation of Catalan Noucentist poetesses—: “the angelic arrangement, the intimate complacency of having everything in its place, of having every emotion within an appropriate and suitable music".
 
Her most representative books are Espigues en flor (1926), with a prologue by Josep Carner, El retorn (1934), without a doubt her most important work, and Lluneta del pagès (1952). Also noteworthy are the translations of Giovanni Pascoli and Francis Jammes and, in prose, Els promesos (1922-23), by Alexandre Manzoni.
 
Although during the Spanish Civil War she sympathized with the Francoist side, during the post-war period she actively participated in clandestine attempts to maintain the Catalan language and literature. The publication of her works experienced many difficulties to overcome censorship. In 1946, she published Llepolies i joguines, the second unreleased book published in Catalan in Mallorca in the immediate post-war period, and in the following years the rest of the volumes of her complete work appeared, including the volume of biographical-literary prose Entre el record i l'enyorança (1955).
 
In the last years of her life she received the homage of the Mallorcan intellectuals, and Josep Carner published Antologia poètica, an important sample and update of her work, finished a few months before her death.
 
As has happened with other historical writers, the work of Maria-Antònia Salvà has had to overcome the prejudices that have socially placed literature written by women on a second level. Today, however, she is considered a modern classic.
 
Source: Web Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana:
https://www.escriptors.cat/autors/salvama/biografia (retrieved on 18/03/2022)

Obras

Bibliografía

Tomàs, Margalida (1991). La trajectòria intel·lectual de Maria Antònia Salvà. Llucmajor (Illes Balears): Ajuntament cop. 

Veny, Joan (1995). La Lliçó lingüística de Maria Antònia Salvà. Barcelona: Fons Badia-Cardús. 

Valero Martí, Gaspar (2008). Els Paisatges de Maria Antònia Salvà. Mallorca (Illes Balears): Departament de Cultura i Patrimoni. 

Enfoque Didáctico

In Valencian language and literature or Catalan language and literature. It can be included in these levels:

- 3rd of ESO: Example of perseverance of a woman who wants to be a poetess and also in Catalan during the Renaissance and the first half of the 20th century.

- 4th of ESO: Sample of post-symbolist poems by the author.

- 1st of Bachillerato: Inclusion of women in the repertoire of the Renaissance.

- 2nd of Bachillerato: Visibility of Salvà as a Catalan post-symbolist poetess.

Documentos