Bèsties 9. Cravan

11.00€

Ten masterpieces by the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, previously unpublished —in Catalan or in any other language— selected and translated by Carles Hac Mor, renowned poet and expert in Cravan’s works. These texts reveal an unknown side of the Swiss poet, subversive in their call for action through a poetry of experience. They bring closer to the reader a tremendous personality, champion of a barely rational aesthetics revered by Dadaists and Surrealists. The last of the poems that we print here is, quite possibly, the final one he completed before he set out alone into the Mexican Gulf, in 1918, and disappeared forever.

Arthur Cravan (Switzerland, 1887 – Mexico, 1918), poet and boxer, was editor and writer at the magazine Maintenant, which prefigured the Dadaist movement and published his poetry, literary criticism and all kinds of written-word eccentricities. Fleeing from World War I, he left France and took shelter in Barcelona. From there, he set sail to New York, where he became acquainted with many personalities of the time. Arthur Cravan disappeared in 1918, when he set out alone on a rowboat into the Mexican Gulf; his body would never be found.

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Bèsties is a wallpaper collection that combines the poetry and the portraits of some of the most acclaimed authors of universal literature. A selection of excerpts —posthumous, unpublished, forgotten— are presented in a groundbreaking format by the translators, current Catalan poets. The posters escape the parcelling of conventional pagination to project in a single canvas the unity of meaning emanating from the poems. Each wallpaper comes with a separate front page including a foreword by the translator, which contextualizes their selection and situates the author in their context.