A Non-Place After Destruction:
Salvador Espriu’s Key to Salom, Sinera, and Sepharad
By Teresa M. Vilarós¹

Salvador Espriu (1913 - 1985) - Photo Source: Wikipedia, Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de la Presidència (1980)

Popular knowledge has it that when the Jews of Spain were brutally expelled in 1492 and plundered of all their belongings, many families took with them the keys to their houses. Why, we wonder, would anyone want to keep the key to a house that was home no more? Unless, of course (and beyond the fact that many may have thought they would be able to return), home would mean something more than the physicality of the place itself, with its real space, light, rooms, and walls resonating with the sounds of songs and prayers; with the impregnated smells of cooking, loving, sleeping; with windows opening to gardens and skies; and, doors to streets, neighborhoods, cities, mountains, sea, and rivers.²

For the expelled Jews of Spain, who from 1492 on would be known as Sephardim, the keys to their houses would function as a token, a physical remembrance of all that was lost and was, from now on, re-located in a for-ever mythical Sepharad.³ It functioned as a sort of comfort-blanket in times of hardship; a harsh, but also optimistic confirmation of that old Castilian-Ladino proverb, “Sien anyos en kadena es mas mijor de un ora debasho de la tierra” (“A hundred years in chains is better than one hour underground”); since the key, although a reminder of the duress experienced by the hundreds of thousands of Iberian Jews killed or forced to leave, also provided a link to each and every home of those suddenly dispossessed of one.⁴ Each particular key formed a symbolic chain; which, along with the Judeo-Spanish they kept for centuries as the intimate language of the home, a language also close to the heart, connected all the Sephardim expanding and resettling around the Mediterranean, Portugal, Amsterdam, and beyond a path to the memory of their lost place.

But because home was lost, however, the symbolic trail provided by the key and the language would signal, more than a path to memory, the trace of a memory. A trace in the sense Jacques Derrida, himself a Sephardi born in Algiers, gave to the word: “A mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present” (141); a trace, continues Derrida, that “has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace” (156).⁵ The language and key to their home provided the Sephardim with that kind of trace: one that, linked to Sepharad, also linked them to a past that Derrida says, actually “can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence” (Derrida, Grammatology 70).⁶

A key, a language, a trace, a memory of brutality, a lost home, and a lost country, now identified as Sepharad. What does all of this have to do with Salvador Espriu i Molas, one of the great Catalan writers of all time?⁷ Espriu was not Jewish. Born in in 1913 in Santa Coloma de Farners, Girona, the family moved to Barcelona in 1915, where he grew up educated in the secular and anticlerical credo of his father, and amidst a tolerant Catholic family milieu provided by his mother. Espriu, however, developed from a very early age a voracious intellectual curiosity for Israel and Judaism. In 1929, already at university where he began studying Law, Ancient Art and History, Semitic and Classical Languages and Humanities, he joined a group of students in an academic Mediterranean cruise to Greece, Egypt, and the Middle East, including Israel (Palestine at the time). He studied the Jewish sacred texts, and continuously searched for wisdom in the Torah, the Mishnah, in Sufi mysticism, Gnosticism, and the Kabbalah. He was conversant also with Judaic texts and Jewish authors of medieval Iberia, both Catalan and Castilian—Maimonides, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra, Shem Tob, Hasday Cresques, and Abraham Shalom.

Espriu published his first book, Israel, in 1929, a youth novel written in Spanish where some of his motifs and life-long references to Jewish culture, tradition, and spirituality were already present. After this first book in Spanish, however, he always wrote in Catalan, publishing mostly in prose until the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and mostly in poetic form thereafter. At the end of the war, he endured a period of literary silence and social isolation until 1946, when Espriu resumed his writing, in Catalan, until his death in 1985.

Before the war began in 1936, young Espriu was the personification of the cosmopolitan, intellectual crowd of early twentieth-century Barcelona, part of an elite of cultivated, well-travelled, and socially committed Catalan youth that gravitated towards the philosophy of secular republicanism and of classical humanities. At the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, however, Espriu went into almost total home seclusion. He experienced the 1939 victory of the Fascist and Nazi-allied military regime of General Francisco Franco in Spain, and the extreme duress enforced against all things Catalan, as a death-like blow against Catalonia, its people, and its language. It was not until 1946 that his first post-war text came out, Cementiri de Sinera (Sinera’s Cemetery), a collection of poems, followed in 1948 by a Kabbalistic, highly cryptic and at the same time exhilarating marionette-play based on the Book of Esther, Primera història d’Esther.⁸

Cementiri de Sinera is a deeply moving text where ‘Sinera’, a literary motif evoking Espriu’s family’s birthplace, the town of Arenys de Mar that had previously appeared before the war in less somber form, comes back now as a cemetery; a metaphor for what he felt was, after the Francoist victory, a ‘dead’, suffocated Catalonia forcefully deprived of the use of its language, almost catatonically surviving under the boot of the dictatorship. In a gesture that somehow relates to the Sephardim keeping their language and key to home, Espriu holds on to Catalan as the key able to provide a path to the lost home, its lights, colors, and smells, its trees, sea, and skies—even if only as a trace, only as a cemetery:

Quina petita pàtria

Encercla el cementiri!

Aquesta mar, Sinera,

Turons de pins i vinya,

Pols de reials. No estimo rés mes, excepte l’ombra

Viatgera d’un núvol.

El lent record dels dies

Que son passats per sempre

(Cementiri de Sinera, II)

[How tiny the country

that enfolds the graveyard!

This sea, Sinera,

the pine and vineyard-covered hills,

the dusty riverbeds. There is nothing

I love more but the shadow

of a drifting cloud.

The slow memory

of days

forever gone.]⁹

(Sinera’s Cemetery, II)

‘Sinera’ symbolically stands in this poem and in the totality of Espriu’s writing for Catalonia as a spiritual nation that has been lost. Sinera is its cemetery, or, its substratum; a non-place, implies the poem: the place of the dead, “enfolded by the graveyard.” The Spanish Civil War has turned ‘Sinera’ (Catalonia) into a cemetery. But Sinera, as the non-place of the dead, of the departed loved ones, paradoxically provides Espriu with the key to give them a poetic voice. It gives Espriu access to the exact register that will make tracing home possible. It will provide him with the key to grammar and a gematria necessary to access it: a crypto-register that, in keeping with Espriu’s deep empathy with Jewish history and spirituality, will mirror the crypto-Jewish practices of after 1492.¹⁰ In sync with the historical Jewish pogroms and expulsions of 1492, Espriu’s after-war texts draw a parallel between that infamous date and the year of 1936: specifically with July 18, 1936, the date of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and the date when ‘Salom de Sinera’, Espriu’s alter ego and poetic voice, is killed in the war: “Recordant allunyadament Salom” (18-vii-1936)” [“Remembering Salom from afar (18-vii-1936)” (Espriu, Les hores, ].¹¹ From that date on, Catalonia is forever Sinera; and Iberia, Sepharad.

During the harsh years of military dictatorship, and especially during the nineteen-forties and fifties, Espriu’s writing turned more and more secret, its true meaning and references making themselves available only to those who would really know of the teaching of the Torah and the Mishnah, those would know the Hebraic language, the Kabbalah, the history of Iberian Jews, and of the Sephardic diaspora.¹² Who in Francoist Spain—in all of Spain over the last five hundred years, actually—were very few until recently, to the point that it was not until a few years after Espriu’s death that the connections of his writing with Judaism, and the Kabbalah, were made.¹³

It is precisely because of its crypto-Jewish mirror sub-stratum quality, Espriu’s oeuvre should be understood as an infra-political exercise instead of a strong political one. Infrapolitics, Alberto Moreiras tells us, is “the name for the space of the gap between private grammar and collective grammar; it is, in Plato’s Greek, a khôra.” ¹⁴ And Espriu’s literary quest, searching for a grammar and gematria known only to a few, can push away the over-imposing collective grammar of Francoism. It cannot escape it completely, as Espriu’s poetic voice speaks only from the place of the dead, the wounded and the lost ones; but, finding a gap, working in the interval of what is and what was, his poetic voice is able to provide Catalonia and its language with a khôra.

Plato used the term khôra to indicate the material substratum of a place, or an interval, the territory, or space, which, in Ancient Greece was located outside the city proper. ‘Sinera’ for Espriu, and also Sepharad for the Sephardim, work as that khôra: ‘Sinera’ symbolically located ‘outside’ Francoist Spain, and Sepharad ‘outside’ the Imperial Spain of the Inquisition. Derrida referred to Plato’s khôra as a sort of non-space, that is, a “space,” or, sort of, that "at times appears to be neither this nor that, at times both this and that," wavering "between the logic of exclusion and that of participation" (Derrida, On The Name, 89).¹⁵ Because destruction and the unthinkable have already happened, Sinera and Sepharad can now in fact be located poetically beyond and ‘outside’ the reach of destructive action. After destruction, they are non-places in the Derridean sense; they are the substratum, the outside of a place, from which re-articulation can be made possible in a crypto-register.

‘Sinera’ refers to Arenys de Mar, the family’s original home, a coastal Mediterranean town located thirty miles north of Barcelona. Arenys, where the extensive family library was housed, where Espriu spent all his summers in his youth, and where he continued to retreat often from Barcelona to read and write, had already became a mythical Judaic ‘Sinera’ in his pre-war texts, her name taken from reading and spelling the name of the town of Arenys from right to left (s-y-n-e-r-a) as if it were Hebraic. But after the war, ‘Sinera’—the most important site of memory, of home-dwelling for Espriu—begins to function in his writing as a crypto-Jewish-like site of mourning and dwelling. In mirroring a crypto-Jewish register mode, the topoi of Sinera allows the ‘tracing’ of the lost home. From below, and as a non-place, from the cemetery of Sinera, the poetic voice of Espriu can speak in Catalan, can use and inhabit the language, and therefore trace back the lost home as haim. Espriu’s poetic voice is that of ‘Salom de Sinera’, Espriu’s alter ego who, dwelling as a ghost in Sinera’s cemetery, is able to speak the voice of the dead, of the exiled, and of those in hiding.

The name ‘Salom’ stresses Espriu’s maternal lineage, the author once again echoing the Jewish tradition, forming his poetic name, like that of ‘Sinera’, from reading and spelling from right to left the poet’s second last name, ‘Molas’, the mother’s family name: ‘S-a-l-o-m’. Like that of Sinera, the figure of ‘Salom’ also appears in Espriu’s pre-war texts. But also as in the case of Sinera, after the war Salom’s voice moves more deeply into the crypto-Jewish-like register, until it disappears after 1954. (Delors, “Fonts Dantesques” 320)¹⁶ After the war, Espriu writes with a hidden heart and a secret mode so the voices of those members of the tribe who are dead, or gone into a perpetual exile, can speak. Espriu’s writing draws a parallel between the archetypical Jewish exile from Israel and his own loss of Catalonia as Sinera (Cocozzella, 241).¹⁷ No wonder then, that Espriu’s post-war texts are almost all of them somber, always tracing like a shadow the forced Jewish diaspora from Iberia, always tracing the lost home.

Salvador Espriu embraces the parallelism set between Spain’s history, Catalonia’s, and the history of the Jewish people; between, on one hand, the Sephardim who left, the Crypto-Jews of Spain who stayed, and those who died; and, on the other, the Catalans who died in and during the war and post-war period, those who went into exile—many to die in the Nazi camps—¹⁸, and those who stayed in reclusion and/or self-exile like Espriu himself. Just as he told us in La pell de brau (The Bull’s Skin), a collection of poems from 1960, he had to engrave [write] “in the skin of the bull [Iberia], with a secret [hidden] and immortal heart, very slowly, the name of Sepharad”: “I anem escrivint en aquesta pell estesa, / en un cor amagat i immortal, / a poc a poc el nom / de Sepharad “ ( La pell de Brau, II, 73)¹⁹.

Sepharad, a theme always active in Espriu’s texts, is highly present in La pell de brau, with the poetic voice urging Spain not to forget Sepharad, not forget what has happened, and strongly calling for Spain to embrace tolerance:

Sometimes it is necessary and right
for a man to die for a people.
But a whole people must never die
for a single man:
remember this, Sepharad.
Keep the bridge of dialogue secured
and try to understand and love
the different minds and tongues of all your children.
Let the rain fall drop by drop on the fields
and the air cross the ample fields
like a soft, benevolent hand.
Let Sepharad live forever
in order and in peace, in work,
and in difficult, hard-won
liberty.

(La pell de brau, Poem XIV / The Bull’s Skin [1960]).

But, in spite of the poet’s call for tolerance and peace, in Francoist Spain Espriu’s Catalonia, his home, his Heim—his haim—, his language, continue to be wounded; and Sepharad remains unable to dwell in a mythical Iberia where convivencia could perhaps have been possible. With Sepharad separated from Iberia, and ‘Sinera’ turned into a cemetery, in La pell de Brau Spain itself is nothing more than ‘Konilòsia’ (land of rabbits). An inhospitable place in relation to which Catalonia is sometimes named, alternatively, ‘Alfaranja’ (the fringe), and, Barcelona ‘Lavinia’ (in classic Roman mythology, Lavonia, a king’s daughter, courted by many men). Barcelona, from where, after the victory of the Francoist para-Fascist movement in 1939, Espriu is unable or unwilling to leave for exile.

That is why after the war Espriu’s writing strongly empathized with the situation of the crypto-Jews of Spain after 1492, and went into self-seclusion enduring a sort of “civil death,” as his friend Maria Aurelia Campany put it.²⁰ He became a crypto-Catalan so to speak, who, having the door to his home and to his language closed away by the military dictatorship, makes use of the hidden architecture provided by the Kabbalah to set what, echoing the five basic principles of Kabbalah, will become in Primera història d’Esther “the garden of the five trees” (“el jardí dels cinc arbres”).

Based on the Book of Esther, Primera història is the only truly joyous work in Espriu’s whole oeuvre.²¹ It provides an exhilarating trip with and within the Catalan language. Driven by language, fueled by language, set free by language, Primera història is one of Espriu’s most brilliant texts, if not the most brilliant. Deeply prescient of what Derrida told us years later, that actually language is that which “ties us to the home, to the fatherland, to the birthplace . . . in short to the family and to the family of words derived from heim-home,”²² the garden of the five trees, a mythical garden in the patio of the house in Arenys, provides the poetic substratum from where Espriu is able to set free a truly marvelous Catalan language. Here ‘home’ is ‘ Heimlich’, friendly, gay, and welcoming. Mixing prose and verse, a Kabbalistic structure presented in hidden form as a theater-play for marionettes supports an intricate and exhilarating architecture able not only to link home with language, but also, and most importantly, heim with the Most High. Writes Espriu,

ALTÍSSIM
Que Déu us doni sempre la seva llum. Jo, l’Altíssim, cec d’aquesta parròquia de Sinera, tinc missió de convocar nens i crescuts, no a la “Sala Mercè”, ara de magna esbaldida, que tant li convenia, sinó al jardí dels cinc arbres, sota el roser de la pell leprosa, la troana, la camèlia, el libanenc i la palmera gànguil, avui, una tarda d’estiu, sense cap núvol al cel, segons quedo notificat per la xerra caritativa de la Neua…. [us convidem] als putxinel-lis de Salom, a mirar i aprendre la bíblica i vera història de la bona reina Esther…. Feu via, que ja el rei s’emprova la corona del seu càrrec, el gran rei, a Sus, lluny d’aquí, potser davant aquests mateixos nassos. Els ninots parlaran i ballaran moguts per la misteriosa traça de l’Eleuteri … que un dia s’escolarà … les cames ben tallades, arreplegat per una màquina … però avui Salom li encarrega encara de comandar la bellugor dels seus titelles … I prego al selecte d’aimainar la gatzara, car la representació comença. Estàs a punt rei de Pèrsia?²³

MOST HIGH
May God’s gift of light be yours forever! I am the Most High, a blind man of this parish of [Sinera], and it is my duty to call young and old together… in the garden with the five trees, under the rose bush with the scabby bark, the privet, the mountain ash, the cedar and the stunted monkey-puzzle tree, this very day, this beautiful summer evening, without a cloud in the sky, as my Snow-White’s charitable chattering tongue informs me. . . . [we are ] inviting you to the poet Selyf’s [Salom’s] puppet show, to see and inwardly digest the true and biblical story of good Queen Esther. Come, now, with your little ones, townsfolk and gentry, men, women and fellow citizens! …. Come in, then, and sit yourselves down where you want to, round the little theatre. Hurry now, for the king is trying on the crown he has to wear, the great king of Shushan, a long way from here, very near here, right under your very noses, maybe. The puppets are going to talk and dance, manipulated by the wonderful skill of … the boy next door, who, as you know, will one day bleed to death … But today Selyf [Salom] can still get him to control the antics of the marionettes. … And may I ask the ladies and gents of the audience to stop their noise, because the show’s starting. Are you ready, King of Persia? (19).²⁴

As the introduction of the English translation states, in Primera història,

The treatment of the Jewish minority by the Persians can be identified to a considerable extent with the treatment of the Catalans by the Spanish dictatorship. But Espriu was no fanatical partisan: in a letter to the translator he wrote of his entrebancós i entrebancat país—his “troublesome and troubled country”—and added “But do not trust it too far: that is my honest advice.” At the end of the play the two worlds—Sinera and Shushan—merge in the person of The Most High: the performance had opened with him and it is he who closes it with an intensely moving speech, asking the audience to pray for a number of real people, dead and living, for him and for the poet Selyf-Espriu [Salom-Espriu], for the Jews and their friends and, transcending the spirit of the Old Testament, for their enemies (11-12).

Language, then, provides us with a key with which to trace our way home, to heim: Judeo-Spanish and Sepharad for the Sephardim, Catalan and Catalonia for Espriu—or, English with a touch of Welsh and Wales for the English translator of Primera història. Only through language will Queen Esther, the undercover Jew, be able to trick the king and save her people. Similarly, Salvador Espriu will be able through language to ‘save’ his.

Even then, however, a Heimlich site (friendly, familiar) can actually very easily turn, Sigmund Freud told us, into an Unheimlich, an ominous, unfamiliar one: “ Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, Unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of Heimlich” (4). In Primera història the ominous fate of the festive audience is always-already present, as it was the fate the King of Persia wanted for the Jews. But in English, the word “home” is etymologically related to the Anglo-German Heim, which developed from the Semitic haim (‘life’). The term haim in turn, is also related to the Judeo-Spanish ‘ogar’, meaning both ‘home’ and ‘hearth’: the hearth in which the fire, the light—the lumbre—, the haim (life) of the home, must be kept alive. For the errant Sephardim, the key that traces a link to the lost ogar, its light, its lumbre, and its language will never be stable after 1492, after 1942.

Unless the term ‘ogar’, home, heim, derived from the Hebraic root haim, maintains, as it does, via nature, language, and/or gematria (the language of the Kabbalah) the link to the Altissimo:

[In] the Torah (in Hebrew), in the very beginning you will notice that when G-d creates the world, only the name Elo-heim is used … It is not until the Torah discusses the creation of man that the name A-donai is used.

Our sages explain that Elo-heim is that aspect of G-d which refers to the creation of the physical world. They tell us that the gematria (the part of Jewish learning that uses the numerical equivalent of the letters) of the name Elo-heim (86) is the same as the Hebrew word for 'the nature', HaTeva(86). This is to emphasize that this name of G-d is bound up with the laws of nature. Or perhaps we can more correctly state that it is nature.²⁵ (emphasis in the original).

For the Sephardim the key opening the path to the lost casa is a key able to trace home (ogar) and language to the Altisimo. A tracing done in this case through Judeo-Spanish: “Bendita sea la casa esta / el ogar de su presencia / donde guardamos su fiesta / con alegría y permanencia (Blessed be this house / The home of his presence / Where we keep his feast /With happiness and permanence) sings the “Bendigamos” prayer, a song still sung today that takes its roots from the old Judeo-Spanish.²⁶

For Salvador Espriu, a non-Jew and an agnostic, the key opening the path to home, to heim, however could only be granted by language, his home language, Catalan. Sinera and Sepharad provided him, and us, with a place where, even as non-place, even as a mirror case, the key to home was left resting close to the heart. It is now up to us to take it.

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¹ Teresa M. Vilarós is Professor in Hispanic Studies and Affiliated Professor in Film Studies at Texas A&M University. Her research interests focus on Spanish and Catalan modern/contemporary visual and cultural studies, with a strong focus on psychoanalytical theory, and critical and political thought.

² For an account of the mixture of sensations accompanying a life, and a home, read His Hundred Years. A Tale, by Shalach Manot, one of the very best contemporary Sephardic novels available.

³ Even though for ancient Jews the term Sepharad referred to the most Western Mediterranean lands where Jews were present, in this essay, and following Salvador Espriu, Sepharad indicates the Judeo-Spanish speaking areas of Iberia before 1492.

⁴ I take the proverb from Gloria J. Asher, who uses it in her wonderful review of Manot’s novel in Ideas. Institute of Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

⁵ Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl′s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p.141; p.156.

⁶ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

⁷ Salvador Espriu i Molas (Santa Coloma de Farners, Girona,1913-Barcleona, 1985), is considered one of the greatest writers in Catalan language of all time. His complete works, all written in Catalan except for the first one, Israel, have been collected in a major critical edition.

⁸ Salvador Espriu, Primera història d’Esther. Salvador Espriu, Primera història d'Esther. Obres completes. Vol 11, Edició Crítica (Barcelona: Centre de Documentació i Estudis Salvador Espriu, Edicions 62, 1995).

⁹ Translated by Andrew Kaufman and Sonia Alland. “Salvador Espriu: Five Poems.” World Literature Today, February 26, 2019.

¹⁰ See Teresa Vilarós-Soler, “Salvador Espriu and the Marrano Heim of Language.” In Writers in between Languages: Minority Literatures in the Global Scene. Mari Jose Olaziregi, ed. (Reno: Center of Basque Studies, University of Nevada UP, 2009), pp. 267-290.

¹¹ Salvador Espriu, Obres completes – Edició crítica. Vol X, cit.

¹² Rosa Delors, one of Espriu’s best scholars has done incredible work tracing all Salvador Espriu’s Judaic and Kabbalistic connotations. See for instance, La Càbala i Espriu: Una poètica de la llum, Ilustracions fotogràfiques de Julia Mehls (Barcelona: Ballasch ed., 2014).

¹³] Rosa Delors was the scholar who first noticed Espriu’s dialog with the Kabbalah and the Judaic tradition.

¹⁴ Continues Moreiras, “Affirmative infrapolitics refers to a strong or militant position on the impossibility of the closing of the gap. In that sense, critics are right–infrapolitics refers to a nothing, hence to nothing. It is the nothing of politics, upon which politics consummates its own permanent catastrophe.” Alberto Moreiras, “One Definition of Infrapolitcs,” Infrapolitcal Deconstruction, January 23, 2018.

¹⁵ Jacques Derrida, “Khôra,” in On the Name. Jacques Derrida, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavy, Jr., Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 89-130; Jacques Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993).

¹⁶ See Rosa Delors, “Fonts Dantesques a l’obra de Salvador Espriu, ”Llengua i literatura, 4 (199-1991), pp. 311-340). Racó Català.

¹⁷ See Peter Cocozzella, “L’historicisme de Salvador Espriu,” Revista de l’Alguer, (pp. 233-250).

¹⁸ See Montserrat Roig, Els catalans als camps nazis. Barcelona: Ed. 62, 2017 (reimpresió)

¹⁹ Salvador Espriu, La pell de Brau.  Obres Completes, Edició crítica. Vol 12, cit.

²⁰ Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Salvador Espriu. Barcelona: Dopesa, 1971, p. 22

²¹ Why the use of “First” in Salvador Espriu’s re-interpretation of the Book of Esther? Maybe because there exists a second book of Esther in the Apocrypha, as Antoni Turull noted in his introduction to the English version of the book. Or, maybe because Espriu is once again playing tricks in a typical marrano-register: the first story of Queen Esther is this one, played and sung in Sinera. Salvador Espriu, Primera historia d’Esther / Story of Esther. Philip Polack, trans. and intro. Antoni Turull, (Oxford: The Anglo-Catalan Society, 1989).

²² Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago & London: Chicago UP, 1995), p. 88.

²³ Salvador Espriu, Primera història d'Esther. Obres completes – Edició crítica. Barcelona: Edicions 62 i Centre de Documentació i Estudi Salvador Espriu, 1995, vol. XI, p.13-14.

²⁴ Salvador Espriu, The Story of Esther. Trans. Philip Polack, (Kent: The Anglo-Catalan Society, 1989), p.19. The English translation I provide here makes a transposition from Catalonia and Sinera to Wales and the Gaelic language. The reasons for the transposition to Wales, as stated in the introduction, were threefold:
“First, to make clearer to British readers or audiences the distinctiveness and richness of the Catalan culture of the original, to show how different it is from that of the ruling power, particularly through linguistic signs—speech and names—and through some of its customs; secondly, to suggest that the problems of minorities are not confined to Catalonia; and thirdly, to express and perhaps capture for others some of the warm affection and nostalgia that Espriu felt for a place and a people and turned into the myth of Sinera” (Introduction, pp. 11-12)

²⁵ Nachum Mohl, “The Secret of the Names of G-d,” The Jewish Magazine, (June 2010).

²⁶ See Edwin Seroussi, “The Odyssey of "Bendigamos": Stranger than Ever.” Studia Rosenthaliana Vol. 44, Mapping Jewish Amsterdam: The Early Modern Perspective (2012), pp. 241-261. In his article, Seroussi follows up on research previously done by Prof. Herman P. Solomon, who “convincingly and elegantly showed the tortuous line of transmission of this song and its reincarnations in French and modern Spanish, until it reached the Shearith Israel Spanish-Portuguese congregation in New York City” (Seroussi 241). The hymn, originally sung by Spanish and Portuguese Jews, has become through the centuries a sort of “international hit of ‘Sephardic music’ or ‘Sephardic liturgy’” (241). Prof. Solomon’s original article can be found in, Herman Prins Solomon, “The Strange Odyssey of ‘Bendigamos,’” American Sephardi 3, no. 1-2 (1969), pp. 69-78.