In the poem "La Relíquia", Joan Alcover evokes the garden of his childhood.

It seems a dream,

The time that has flown

From my life,

Without the wounds it has left on my heart;

Without the wounds that now open again

When I see that the garden fountain

Does not overflow, nor sing, nor cry.

Thirty years of my life flew by fast,

And there is still

Hung from the branch

A length of cord from the swing,

As a sad memory,

Decayed remains of a torn down world...

Mutilated faun,

Dry fountain,

Desolate garden

Of my youth.

«La relíquia», Cap al tard, 1909

Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by Antoni Maria Thomàs.

(1854 - 1926). To talk of Joan Alcover is to refer to one of the most representative poets of the Majorcan school of poetry. His life and work can be divided into two stages marked by a series of tragedies that affected his life. The death of his first wife and two of his children transformed him into the great poet of Catalan literature in the early 20th century.

Alcover graduated in Law and dedicated his life to politics by becoming part of Antoni Maura’s party as a representative at the City Hall. He was a poet who wrote in Castilian, the author of minor and uninteresting works: a superficial poetry that imitated the great Castilian and European poets of the time. His great personal crisis awoke in him the genuine voice of a poet that turned poetry into a means of expression of his pain. He was fully conscious that these feelings could only be expressed sincerely in his mother tongue, giving him full access to his anguish.

This change of attitude coincides with a period of construction for the Catalan language, and Alcover is clearly motivated by the work of linguists such as Antoni M. Alcover, and later he took part in the First Conference on the Catalan Language.

La Relíquia (The relic) is a poem written at the behest of Santiago Russinyol. The pain of the past and the loss of loved ones is the starting point, and the desolate present leads him to evoke the garden of his childhood.

Joan Alcover is a leading figure in the “Renaixença”, a movement that emerged in early 19th-century Catalonia and aimed for a rebirth of Catalan language and literature after centuries of belittlement. It shared the concerns of Romanticism and values the historical, linguistic and cultural past. In Majorca, ideas from the Renaixença were introduced by figures such as Josep M. Quadrado, Marià Aguiló and Josep Lluís Pons i Gallarza.

Years later the term “Escola Mallorquina” (Majorcan school) was coined to define the contribution of Majorcan writers to the Renaixença, covering poets from Romanticism until the 1950s. On the one hand, aesthetically we can say that it is a poetry that follows the classical canon and values formal aspects, and on the other it presents a cosmopolitan and nationalist sentiment since it aims to integrate Majorcan literature and its unique features into Catalan literature and the various European currents of the time. Miquel Costa i Llobera and Joan Alcover are the fathers of the movement. It is difficult to talk of a single, clear literary school, but rather a variety of tendencies that comprise a golden age on the islands.