Emigdi Subirats i Sebastià

Gerard Vergés was not merely a poet — he was a constellation of passions, a scholar of desire, and a voice that shimmered with both intellectual depth and emotional clarity. Born in Tortosa on 7th March 1931, where the Ebre river moves like an ancient thought through the land, Vergés carried within him the quiet conviction of someone who knew that culture is resistance, and beauty, a form of truth.

Above all, he was a reader turned creator — a man whose loves became the pillars of his work. No figure influenced him more than Ausiàs March, the fierce, conflicted medieval poet whose voice Vergés saw not as a relic, but as a living current. In Ausiàs, he found not just a master, but a brother, a companion in the lifelong attempt to name love’s splendour and cruelty.

His relationship with poetry, however, was expansive. He revered Shakespeare with an almost sacred admiration, not simply for his genius, but for the precision and humanity of his verse. So great was Vergés’s devotion that he undertook the monumental task of translating all of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Catalan, a work of such clarity and fidelity that it stands as a masterpiece in its own right. He didn’t merely render words, he preserved music, emotion, and thought across centuries and languages.

This reverence extended to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s troubled prince. Vergés collected editions of Hamlet in dozens of languages, fascinated by how the same existential anguish could wear so many linguistic costumes. His library, full of Hamlets, was like a sanctuary of mirrors—each one reflecting another layer of meaning, another iteration of that eternal question: “to be or not to be?”

Yet Gerard Vergés never lived only among books. He was deeply rooted in the land and the people of the Ebre. His love for Catalonia was fierce, lucid, and unwavering. He raised an estelada from his home in La Simpàtica, a wealthy neighbourhood in Tortosa, not for show but as a daily act of silent defiance. When the Spanish government, under “the man with the moustache,” attempted to bleed the Ebre dry through the National Hydrological Plan, Vergés stood up. He marched not only through the streets of his town, but all the way to Brussels in 2001, joining thousands to defend the river that shaped his identity and his poetry. For him, the Ebre was more than water, it was memory, lifeblood, and belonging.

His cultural devotion went beyond literature. He was a discerning art critic, and his work on Antoni de Casanovas, the Tortosan XIX century painter, is a landmark study, melding aesthetic analysis with historical depth, always written in that unmistakable Vergés voice: clear, thoughtful, and quietly impassioned. He wrote about painting the way he wrote about poetry—with care, with reverence, and always with the sense that beauty demands precision.

His poetry—especially in works like L’ombra rogenca de la lloba is where all these threads converge. That book is a testament to his singular genius: a seamless blend of the sensual and the scholarly, where metaphor becomes knowledge, and where desire is not ornamental, but philosophical. The reddish shadow of the she-wolf evokes myth, instinct, seduction, but beneath it lies a vast web of cultural echoes: classical antiquity, religious doubt, erotic truth, and linguistic elegance.

Gerard Vergés was, in every sense, an encyclopedic mind with a fiercely poetic heart. He was a Catalan humanist in the richest tradition, bridging the past and present, the sensual and the sacred, the personal and the political. He didn’t just write poetry,he lived it, with all the tenderness and all the sharpness that implies.

And although he is gone, his voice endures—calm, luminous, unyielding—like the river he so much loved, forever flowing.

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