Atlantis – Jacint Verdaguer

[Fum d’Estampa Press; 2024]

Tr. from Catalan by Ronald Puppo

In line after cataclysmic line, Atlantis tells the story of the fabled continent’s total destruction, its ten cantos evoking a landscape more nightmarish than Dante’s Hell or the Hades of Greek myth. In Jacint Verdaguer’s nineteenth-century Catalan epic poem, the doomed continent is swallowed by flames and terrible storms as the sky is filled with ash and dust. Giant waves crash into the land, and its Titan inhabitants attempt in vain to escape the deluge by sheltering on a mountain whose highest peaks are not spared. Debris falls “in a furious rain,” hurricane-force winds sweep across the land, and the earth rips open at the Atlanteans’ feet. The inhabitants face “no less than a world groaning in its death throes.” And they, too, are dying: their bodies form “great heaps,” making a “bridge of deceased” in the frenzied water. But not everyone from Atlantis is lost: Hesperis, the widowed queen, escapes to the east with her Greek hero, Hercules. There, they found what will become Spain, a new land in the wake of the old. Like an Iberian Aeneid, Atlantis—published in 1877 and newly translated into English by Ronald Puppo—is a story of national creation.

For all its bleak imagery, Atlantis is also a poem of beauty and redemption. In their new home, Hesperis and Hercules plant an orange branch taken from Hesperis’s garden in Atlantis. The branch becomes an orange grove, where the canopy of fruit trees glimmers “like an emerald sky sprinkled with golden stars,” recalling Hesperis’s lush garden in Atlantis:

Rows of lofty citrons and cinnamon trees,

stooping under the soft weight of fresh blooms,

gather by twos in archways shady and green,

where dawn peeps through a trellis of golden fruit.

These moments of tranquility and quiet beauty would be at home among the works of any other great romantic poet. They stand out against the poem’s more violent scenes, adding weight to those scenes by sharpening the sense of loss they create. The poem cycles through creation and destruction, peace and brutality, in a controlled vortex of poetic imagery and emotion.

It’s no surprise, then, that Verdaguer (1845–1902) is considered one of the greatest Catalan poets. He was already acclaimed in his time: Atlantis won him the special prize in Barcelona’s prestigious Jocs Florals poetry contest, where he had previously won six prizes for other works. But unlike national poets in most other traditions—Shakespeare, Goethe, or Pushkin, for instance—Verdaguer didn’t write in the dominant language of his nation. He composed his poetry in Catalan, the language of the Catalonia region in northeastern Spain. In doing so, he was making a bold linguistic choice: Catalan had largely declined as a literary language after the medieval period, when it flourished, and Spanish had become the prestige literary language. Questions of language also involved questions of national identity and sovereignty. After the War of the Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth century, the Crown of Castile abolished the local political institutions of Catalonia and other territories that had existed under the Crown of Aragon, bringing these territories under the rule of one centralized Castilian monarchy. The state then aggressively promoted Spanish, making it the standard administrative and legal language across all of Spain, though Catalonians continued to learn Catalan and speak it in daily life. Despite or because of their native language’s official marginalization, many Catalonian writers in the nineteenth century proudly took up Catalan, aiming to reestablish it as a language of culture and connecting its use to ideas of Catalan nationalism. Verdaguer became a key figure of this revivalist movement, called the Renaixença, and patriotism toward the Catalan nation is one of his main themes. His other dominant theme is religion: he was an ordained priest who also served as a ship’s chaplain—appropriately, he finished writing Atlantis while crossing the Atlantic from Cuba to Spain.

The legend of Atlantis was far from new when Verdaguer was writing, but the context he transposes it into is entirely his own creation. Set in a frame narrative, the story of the lost continent forms the majority of the poem, and is buttressed by an introduction and a conclusion in which a hermit tells the story to a mariner, who has washed ashore on the hermit’s island after a battle at sea. Inspired by the hermit’s tale of a new world, the mariner rushes off at the end of the poem, determined to raise funds for a voyage across the ocean. After several failures, the resolute mariner eventually finds a patron, and the poem ends with the hermit triumphantly imagining how Spain will soon expand to the other side of the Atlantic. Since Atlantis is what Puppo calls “the foundational epic of the Iberian Peninsula,” the patron is none other than Isabella of Castile, and the mariner is Christopher Columbus himself. By making Columbus his hero, Verdaguer projects an image of a burgeoning Spanish empire poised for growth. He imagines its glories and, by creating a mythic origin story for it, perhaps aims to awaken or nurture a sense of a unified, powerful nation among his contemporaries. The poem, then, reads less like a nostalgic paean to the imagined past and more like a rallying cry for the empire’s future—even though, when Verdaguer was writing, most of Spain’s colonies were already independent.    

Verdaguer ties this nationalist theme to a Christian one by identifying a unique religious mission for Spain: the newly formed empire should take Christianity across the Atlantic. The creation of Spain, then, means the birth of Christianity around the world. In Verdaguer’s poem, the nation is subordinate to religion—it’s a means to spread Christianity. And Spain’s religious mission connects back to Atlantis, with the Atlanteans serving as a reminder of the consequences of sin. They brought their fate on themselves by sinning, taking “the fateful path of pleasures.” Filled with hubris, they “thought themselves eternal.” After obliterating Atlantis, the angel of destruction, sent by God, tells the world that it will return on Judgement Day: in the new land, Atlantis’s fate hangs over Hesperis and Hercules—and, presumably, Verdaguer’s contemporary readers. The poem is unwavering in its didacticism.

Atlantis may be a moralistic and theological text, but it is also a poetic one. Along with its beautiful descriptions of nature and its rich language, it succeeds in depicting genuine human emotion: above all, in its portrait of Hesperis’s suffering. She escapes with Hercules while her old home crumbles and burns behind her. Everything she knows is gone, and she becomes an outsider in her new land. Thinking wistfully of Atlantis, where she can never return, Hesperis continues the poem’s motif of uprootedness, telling the orange tree, planted using a branch from her old garden, that “I, exile on a foreign beach, know not / how to take root, like you, and bloom once more.” Later, she resumes this motif, picking up her “lyre of long-lost days” and singing:

I am the grass of another place, torn from the terrain;

I have hillocks, sunshine and shade, zephyr and buds;

but less the kiss of the fragrant breeze of my cradle,

what else can I do, tell me, but weep and succumb?

Her lamentations recall the world’s great poems of exile, her emotions ringing out like the peal of a bell:

Fragrant dreams of May, how soon you vanished!

Now fraught with thorns my soul can only sigh;

so soothing once your fluttering wing and kiss—

now but woe for my soul, tears for my eyes.

Lines like these don’t excuse the poem’s politics, which can be difficult to stomach in the twenty-first century, but they offer at least one reason to read the poem today.

They are, in fact, the primary reason. Hesperis’s story is the highlight of a poem that, in the end, often feels dated, even stale. Puppo—who has previously translated several books from Catalan, including Selected Poems of Jacint Verdaguer—undertook the difficult task of maintaining Verdaguer’s rhyme scheme in English, often using different types of rhyme or other devices to suggest the end rhyme of the original while retaining the poem’s sense. In the second stanza of canto two, for instance, he rhymes “wonders” with “waters” where the original reads “emmerletar” and “mar,” and “mouths” and “down” for “enormes” and “deformes.”

The assonance of “mouths” and “down” approximates the effect of the original’s end rhyme, without actually being end rhyme. Thanks to Puppo, the poem’s renowned beauty often comes through in the translation. But its language can still be convoluted or archaic at times, as in the first stanza of canto two:

Hercules embarks, and soon ancient Tarraco,

seeing him pass by, her girdling walls now tightens,

and lance and shield holding fast, gift of Cyclopes,

seems to say: “He looks mighty, but I will fight him.”

Readers may stumble over occasional lines like these, with their unconventional subject-object-verb word order—”Tarraco her girdling walls tightens.” Unclear language obscures the plot, which can already be difficult to follow, filled as it is with a jumble of place names and mythological beings. Students of Catalan literature or readers interested in narratives of colonialism and national formation may find much insight in the poem. But outside those restricted spheres, Atlantis, even with its moments of beauty, falls short of offering readers anything truly worth the effort it demands. 

Noah Slaughter writes fiction and essays, translates from German, and works in scholarly publishing. He lives in St. Louis.