Author

He might carry a bucket in one hand, and a brush in the other. Now and then he would stop and, feeling around, might start painting on air. For even though no one has seen him doing so it doesn’t mean he can’t, or that now, even now, he isn’t.

Even though he would often talk to himself, or so it would seem, he might also say that “if we do some figuring, most of the time, of each day’s time, that is, we go without talking to anybody, or if we do, it is a monologue.”

His poems would be a tangle of emotions, a mixture of both the deepest anguish and the most exultant joy of living, which would really prove our hypothesis on the bucket and the ingredients it most likely contains. Such words would justify “an imperative need for holing isolation and expel what lies behind these impertinent silences.”

One day he might get to tell us his fears -once we established a deep friendship, which might be hard-, that there would be “plenty of shit” in the bucket. And if another day passed and we came to feel it is him -really, and given the circumstances, it is thoroughly unlikely-, we might hear him mutter “a monologue that starts a voice that is yet another monologue and so on and on, nonstop, until despair, until death.”

All the poems that should be written would be part of a project he can’t tell whether he might complete- namely, empty the bucket regularly-. It is yet one more way to not be dead.

Catalan poetry

1990 Xiscle
1992 Ena menys una
1995 Druda
2000 Trit
2004 Miserere
2004 Vacu, l’ésser sofrent
2005 Nicis
2007 Ecs, perpetuum mobile
2007 Atziacs
2007 A furt – Obra poètica 1990-2006
2008 Bra, llavis negres
2011 Fora, en estat de sense sostre
2012 Excretòria
2015 Brosta, verd sobre verd – Web 2.0
2018 Rost

Spanish translations

2004 Chillido (by Isabel Foo)
2005 Ene menos una (by Isabel Foo)
2006 Druda, el vigilante de la obra (by Isabel Foo)
2009 Vacu, el ser sufriente

Other translations

Vacu, the suffering being
(English by Ángel Mirou)

바꾸 고통의 존재
(Korean by Mihwa Jo & Singyu Kang)

Vacu, izaki sufritzailea
(Basque by Jon Elordi)

Vacu, o ser sufrinte
(Galician by María Cuiñas)

バクー 苦悩する者
(Japanese by Yukiko Kimura)