He completed primary studies at his village’s parish school. At fourteen, he began working in the office of a cotton spinning mill. He would work there for nearly thirty years, until 1973 when multiple sclerosis forced him to leave his job and rendered him a severely disabled pensioner. Previously, at nineteen, he had suffered from severe pulmonary tuberculosis. Married twice, he has two children from his first marriage.

He has published over thirty books, mostly poetry. However, he has also edited a volume of short stories, two ‘novelized memoirs,’ and a book of correspondence with the poet Joan Vinyoli. Currently, his Poetic Works are being published in the ‘Clàssics Catalans del segle XX’ collection by Edicions 62. In personal volumes or anthologies, his poetry has been translated into, among other languages, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English, Italian, Flemish, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Russian, Japanese, etc., and also, in the exceptional case of a poem commissioned by UNESCO, into Chinese, Arabic, and Esperanto.

He has translated about twenty books, mainly from French, with sporadic incursions into Spanish and Italian. Some of the authors whose books he has translated include: Neruda, Saint-Exupéry, Apollinaire, Flaubert, Zola, Racine, Huysmans, Gianni Rodari, etc.

Among others, he has received the Óssa Menor Prize, the Fastenrath Prize, the ‘Premio de la Crítica,’ the Salvador Espriu Prize, the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize (first for translation and later for poetry), the international ‘Nosside’ Prize in Aosta Valley, etc. In 1991, he was awarded the Premi d’Honor de les Lletres Catalanes.

He holds the Creu de Sant Jordi, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts 1992 from the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Also the National Literature Prize (1998) and the Gold Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1999).