Ana María Martínez Sagi

Barcelona, 1907 - Moià, Barcelona, 2000

Ana María Martínez Sagi was an athlete, journalist, activist and poet. She enjoyed tennis, competitive swmming and skiing and she was national champion of jabaline throwing in 1931. Journalism and poetry kept her pen busy until the war broke out. After working as war correspondent she went to exile to France. In the 1950s she left Europe and moved to Illinois where she worked as a university language tutor until 1977. She then returned to Spain and lived in isolation until her death.

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To grant life nobility, dignity, beauty and eminence is a monumental undertaking.

At the beginning of what would be a lengthy exile first in Europe and then in USA, the author notes that modern times have not made us happier. Modernity brought sports, journalism and activism to her life but it also brought war. She is afraid of the dehumanization of a world dominated by machines because she feels this lack of humanity in a particularly intense way influenced by a sense of not belonging central to her experience of exile.

I am an outsider everywhere. All my hopes and beautiful dreams have already been shattered.

In the middle of the twentieth century Sagi realises that exile is a defining feature of her times. France, Sweden and USA are the destinations of her years on the run. She saw herself as nomadic, a foreigner everywhere she went, including Spain where she returned to in the 1960s to publish her poetry.

Why will my body endure so much, when what I'm longing for is to close my eyes forever?

Ana Sagi bids farewell dominated by anger. Her return to Spain hurt her, she did not feel welcome and she found no traces of her youth ideals, perhaps forever defeated. She feels exiled in her country of birth and she also feels writing will also abandon her. In a world that has lived global war, in a world in which she cannot love, why write? She does give an answer though: her voice is for us, for our time.