Miquel Costa i Llobera (Pollença, 1854 – Palma de Mallorca, 1922) was a poet, translator, orator and prose writer. With a life straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, he is regarded as one of the key figures of the so-called Mallorca School. Moreover he is a crucial figure in the evolution of modern Catalan poetry.

His early poetry was influenced by Romanticism as can be divined in his first collection Poesies (Poems, 1885), a particularly outstanding poem from this period being (The Pine of Formentor, 1878). He then published the collections De l’agre de la terra (From the Bitterness of the Earth, 1897) and Tradicions i fantasies (Traditions and Fantasies, 1903) in which he reproduced Mallorcan customs and legends in literary form. His narrative poem La deixa del geni grec (The Legacy of the Genius of the Greeks) was awarded the Eglantina Prize in the 1902 Jocs Florals (a literary competition) of Barcelona, the year in which he was also nominated Mestre en Gai Saber (Master in the Art of Poetry) and, accordingly, member of the Spanish Royal Academy. He then began to move definitively towards classical models, culminating with his work Horaciones (Poems in the Manner of Horace, 1906). Thenceforth he devoted himself fully to the priesthood. A notable work from this period is Visions de Palestina (Visions of Palestine, 1908), which he based on his journey to the Holy Land.

He also translated several scattered texts of Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Victor Hugo, Lamartine and Prudentius. Miquel Costa Llobera started out from the Romantic model, went beyond Renaissance and Jocs Florals poetry and, after a fleeting phase of Modernism, would finally link his poetry, with its classical influences, to the Catalan Noucentista cultural movement.



Web page: X. R. Trigo for AELC.
Documentation: Gabriel Boloix.
Translation: Julie Wark.