Literary Criticism · Catalan Studies · 2026

Abstract

This essay reads Carles Riba’s Les elegies de Bierville as a profound meditation on the transformation of historical trauma into an ethical architecture of form, song, and love. Moving beyond a purely documentary account of post-Spanish Civil War Catalan displacement, the essay argues that Riba constructs a tightly ordered journey of return: spiritual, erotic, civic, Orphic, and theological. At the center of this poetic sequence lies a sustained struggle against Indifference, identified here as the work’s ultimate existential antagonist. By tracing the book’s internal movement—from the shattered horizontality of Elegy I to the vertical monumentality of the ruined temple at Sunion, from erotic knowledge and civic responsibility to Orphic descent and divine intimacy, and finally to the disciplined restraint of the concluding “Endreça”—this essay shows how Riba deploys classical measure not as aesthetic escape, but as a rigorous discipline of moral survival. Ultimately, it offers a mature philological and existential reflection on how a self, a language, and a culture can be broken without becoming shapeless, and how Riba transforms raw suffering into a universal affirmation of human solidarity.

Keywords: Carles Riba; Les elegies de Bierville; Catalan poetry; Twentieth-century Catalan literature; Exile literature; Spanish Civil War exile; Classical reception; Sunion; Orpheus; Pompeu Fabra; Catalan philology; Civic humanism; Poetry and theology; Poetics of trauma and form

Suggested Citation

Borrull, Francesc. “Broken Without Becoming Shapeless: Exile, Form, and Love in Carles Riba’s Les elegies de Biervillea.” 2026.

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