Les Llunyanies

Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s poetic work written in exile, which we are presenting today in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of his death, is a unique phenomenon not only in the history of literature and documentaries of our country, but also on the European scene.

In effect, as David Serrano claims, this book “constitutes a relevant document of the concerns and reflections of a committed and sensitive person, which is converted into a testimony and a symbol of the willingness to stay alive and maintain a strictly humanist dignity in a concentration camp: paradigm of the human capacity for destruction and self-destruction, and, at the same time, of the essence of the human being”.

The seventy-one poems contained in this volume are written from the perspective of absence – the “distance” the title refers to, the future that will judge those responsible for the tragedy. It also alludes to the absent figure of a woman, in whom the poet finds shelter in order to withstand the nearly five years of nightmare in a concentration camp.

“Here are – in the words of Jordi Castellanos – the poetry of truth, of the purest human authenticity: Joaquim Amat-Piniella, in the middle of the adventure he told us in ‘K.L. Reich’, a masterpiece of Holocaust literature, looks for salvation in words: he feels rebellious and he expresses his rebellion”.