Poema III de El viaje final (poemario inédito)

Abstract

The following poem is the third section of an unpublished book titled El viaje final. I began writing the book after my father’s death in 2016 as a way of dealing with grief and continued working on the book in 2017. The book contains eight sections and is the first volume of a poetry based on the life of Jaime Ferrán. Poem III begins with his death in February of 2016 in Smyrna, in the Atlanta area. He had been living with me for three years, from 2013 to 2016. The poem also goes into his childhood and adolescence in Catalonia, up until the time he went off to study law at the University of Barcelona in the second half of the 1940s. I chose this section because it seemed the most emotional, a text in which the memories of my father’s life merge with my own. The first volume of El viaje final ends with Poem VIII, in which my father travels for the very first time in 1955 to the United States.

Keywords:

• Father
• poet
• travel
• youth
• Catalonia
• United States

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaime María Ferrán

Jaime María Ferrán is the son of Jaime Ferrán. He is Associate Professor of Spanish at Clark Atlanta University (Atlanta, Georgia) and has a Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of North Carolina (2003). His area of specialization is Spanish twentieth-century poetry and he has published the following books: Sociedad y ciudad en la poesía de José Agustín Goytisolo (2006) and La ruptura posmoderna. Esteticismo y culturalismo en los poetas novísimos españoles (2017). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as Romance Notes, Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, Salina (revista de lletres), and Cincinnati Romance Review. His books of poetry are Poemas del mar en Carolina del Norte (2004), Media luna sobre Memphis (2019), and Postal (abrazos desde Miami) (2021).