Fall of ’59, summer of ’66
An open letter by Juan Marsé, one of Spain’s great living writers, to the late poet Jaime Gil de Biedma
Juan Marsé
13 October, 2017
At the height of this week’s Catalan crisis, social media began echoing an impressive poem, Sad October Night, that the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma dedicated to his friend Juan Marsé in 1959. Alerted by EL PAÍS about this fact, Marsé – who is one of Spain’s great living writers and has publicly expressed horror about current events in the northeastern region – revisited that moving poem and has now written an open letter to his beloved Gil de Biedma, who died in 1990: