Six Catalan Poets

by Pere Ballart (Editor), Anna Crowe (Translator)

Overview

History shows how Catalan culture has overcome critical situations far more adverse than the present. The Catalan language has not been replaced and this anthology contains four Catalans, one Valencian and one Mallorcan, who, although they lived through the tail end of the dictatorship, grew up under a democratic regime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906570606
Publisher:	ARC Publications
Publication date:	03/08/2013
Series:	New Voices from Europe & Beyond
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.44(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A (TELESCOPIC) LOOK AT CATALAN POETRY

In 2003, Arthur Terry's excellent A Companion to Catalan Literature opened with the avowed purpose of shedding light for the benefit of the English-speaking reader on "an important but, on the whole neglected, area of Peninsular culture". Terry states that during the past century Catalan writers have been far less well-known outside their own country than artists from other disciplines, such as Gaudí, Miró, Tàpies, Pau Casals, Montserrat Caballé, whereas all have exhibited "a similar degree of excellence". Ten years later, the situation has barely changed: the literature of the main territories in which Catalan is spoken (Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands) still fails to compete with the cultural (and touristic) attraction of its respective capitals, Barcelona in particular. Furthermore, given its political dependence, it has to compete while always being associated, in one way or another, with the majority culture and language of the State to which these territories, administratively speaking, belong: Spain and Castilian. This is a shocking situation when we realise that we are speaking about a thousand-year-old literature whose earliest manifestations date from the twelfth century, written in a language spoken by ten million people (the twelfth most spoken language of Europe) and with in excess of ten thousand titles published each year, especially in Barcelona, an important publishing centre. With the Franco dictatorship over and after more than thirty years of democracy, the country retains intact its unfulfilled national aspirations which would, given the opportunity, bring together all aspects of its culture. Meanwhile, we have had to wait for occasions such as the Frankfurt Book Fair of 2007, in which Catalan culture was special guest, in order to reveal its quantity and excellence to the outside world. I would like to think, as the anthologist of these six Catalan poets, that their publication is one more step and, I hope, a firm one, in this direction. After all, we should have confidence in the future, first because literary activity, fed by new recruits, never ceases throughout the Catalan countries, and secondly because history shows, every step of the way, how our culture has been strong enough to overcome critical situations far more adverse than the present. It will be useful to cast our minds back.

In 1953, one of the most clear-sighted Catalan poets of the twentieth century, Gabriel Ferrater, published in the Spanish magazine Ínsula a grim diagnosis of the health of Catalan culture: 'Madame se meurt' (The Lady is Dying). Ferrater was alluding to the lecture given by the French poet, Paul Valéry, in Barcelona in 1924, with its serious warning to the local intelligentsia that it should devote itself above all to prose: the author of Le Cimetière Marin was flagging up the example of another minority culture that has become extinct, Occitan, which, even when represented by figures like the Nobel prizewinner, Frédéric Mistral, was already "dead through having been nothing but poetry". Ferrater used the argument to warn how Catalan culture too was in grave danger, in spite of producing a rich flow of poetry. His fear was that without powerful prose and within the frame of a life "void of legalities" – it is easy to see here a denunciation of the Franco regime's persecution of Catalan language and identity – the Catalan people would one day end by adopting, as an instrument of expression, a language other than their own. More than half a century later, Catalan has not been replaced, but has been forced to carry on side by side with Castilian. It may seem that Ferrater, bird of ill omen, was exaggerating, but an historical overview of Catalan poetry, full of brilliance and shadows, is enough to make clear the real perils that this writer was alerting us to.

As heir to the Provençal troubadour tradition, poetry in Catalan knew a moment of extraordinary splendour in the fifteenth century when, under the influence of Petrarch, it included the giant figure of Ausiàs March, the most prodigious lyric poet among the many others flourishing at that time, and an example of meditative introspection. But it is equally true that, a little later, it had to overcome a dense silence that lasted from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries: the so-called 'Decadence', a period of Spanish political and cultural hegemony during which this illustrious tradition seemed to be alive only in the weak, anonymous beat of popular poetry. Without the impetus, Romantic in origin, associated with a renewed national consciousness that animated what became known in the nineteenth century as the 'Renaissance', the future of poetry and indeed of Catalan culture as a whole would have been disastrous. The country recovered confidence in its language through poetry that was epic in concept and patriotic in tone, and it would not be wrong to see its history from then on as a slow recovery towards catching up with Western poetry after three centuries of abeyance. From this time of re-establishment then, the principal names within the genre are those who were most responsible for reducing that décalage: Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902), energetic forger of a poetic language; Joan Maragall (1860-1911), an example of moral sincerity; and Josep Carner (1884-1970), a believer in the perfect form, though not as an obstacle to the communication of deeply held feelings, but rather as their best ally. In the course of his work we witness, as though in a speeded-up film, the irreversible awakening of the Catalan poetic. From the beginning of the twentieth century, with the language now become a trustworthy and standardized instrument, until the fracture imposed by the Civil War, the authentic flourishing of the genre produced a handful of first class writers: Carles Riba, J. V. Foix, Joan Salvat-Papasseit, Joan Oliver / Pere Quart, and Agustí Bartra. Taken together, they covered to an extraordinary degree the whole gamut of forms, themes and tones, from rationalist abstraction to surrealism, from eroticism to satire, from the hymn to the elegy. The diaspora of exile, the harsh Francoist repression and the premature disappearance of writers such as Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel and Màrius Torres, gave rise to fears of another period of obscurity, and nothing could better exemplify this than the death of Carles Riba – becoming the most powerful symbol of cultural resistance – in 1959. The end of the fifties seemed to presage a definite decline; fortunately, however, the reasons for despondency soon proved to be without foundation.

In fact the following decade could not have begun in more promising fashion. The appearance in 1960 of Da nuces pueris (Give the Children Nuts to Eat) by Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972) and La pell de brau (The Bull's Hide) by Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) attest to the widespread evidence of an engaged civil realism, but which each poet understands in his own way. Espriu oriented his usual meditation on death towards historic circumstances; Ferrater, on the other hand, launched a poetry of moral experience (in the style of poets like Auden or Graves) which his later work, collected in 1968 as Les dones i els dies, was to make yet more dense and subtle (translated into English in 2004, it aroused, for example, the admiration of Seamus Heaney). The influence in Catalonia of these two great poets is similar to that which made Blai Bonet (1926-1997) the great reviver of Balearic poetry and Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924-1993) the Valencian poet of greatest importance after Ausiàs March. This decade finally also brought to fruition three bodies of work as notable as they are distinctive: the tireless experimentalism of Joan Brossa (1919-1998), the figurative symbolism of Joan Vinyoli (1919-1984), and the profound and pared-down diction of Miquel Martí i Pol (1929-2003), whose popularity gave him, right up until his death, the prominence reserved for a national poet.

The following decade, that of the seventies, is one of slow political transition to democracy. It is a time when the exponents of either meditative, confessional and autobiographical realism, or experimentalism, or concrete poetry, consolidate their positions. In the first group are those who offer a moral, critical poetry, which bears down on the past and on memory: a poetry of experience or rather of 'inexperience' which each individual comes up against when constructing their personality. Here we should include, in chronological order, Joan Margarit (born 1938), author of a copious series of titles, of which those published in the nineties (Edat roja, Els motius del llop, Aiguaforts – Red Age, The Motives of the Wolf, Etchings) are the ones that illustrate his style most clearly. Successor in popular acclaim to Martí i Pol, Margarit is a poet of emotive power, whose tone is increasingly trenchant and austere. Marta Pessarrodona (born 1941) composes learned, civilised poems and always in the form of a confiding conversation, as a defence against time and the threats posed by history, in that her writing weighs the personal as much as the collective, from Setembre 30 (September 30, 1969) to Animals i plantes (Animals and Plants, 2010). Narcís Comadira (born 1942), with a feeling for language akin to Carner, is always elegant and plastic (as he is in his other art, painting) and has created out of personal experience highly flexible poetic material: Formes de l'ombra (Shadow Shapes, 2002) gathers together almost forty years of sustained production. With its precocious exploration of beat poetry, the work of Francesc Parcerisas (born 1944) is the paradigm of poetry rooted in experience, beginning with the huge success of L'edat d'or (The Golden Age, 1983), whose title is suggestive of a perfect balance between sensuality and rationalism which his subsequent collections have made more profound and expressionistic. Two other poets of this period deserving of attention are Pere Rovira (born 1947) in whom the themes of love and death take on Baudelairean overtones, and Àlex Susanna (born 1957), active promoter of things cultural, whose poetry is remarkable for its desire to construct "verbal models of private life", as urged by Spender.

Champions of a less narrative lyric, other poets have taken a more experimental route. Among the more avant-guarde is Enric Casasses (born 1951), a frequent performer at recitals and readings. Transgressing and naif, meticulously crafted and dadaist, the outstanding collections of his poetic corpus are La cosa aquella (That Thing, 1992), Calç (Lime, 1996) and Que dormim? (You Think We Should Sleep?, 2002). When considering poetry that raises questions about the limits of language, we should mention the work of Pere Gimferrer (born 1945) who straddles the Castilian and Catalan traditions. Books that stand out among his Catalan collections are Els miralls (Mirrors, 1970), L'espai desert (The Empty Space, 1977) and El vendaval (The Hurricane, 1988), characterized by rich, intellectually complex and elliptical writing. The work of Maria Mercè Marçal (19521998) sets down a marker for the consistency of her voice as a woman. The experience of the femininine, motherhood, and illness forms the basis of her books, Sal Oberta (Bare-faced Salt, 1982), La germana, l'estrangera (Sister, Stranger, 1985), Desglaç (Thaw, 1989) or the posthumous Raó del cos (The Body's Reason, 2000). And it would not be right to disregard other voices from a period of vigorous activity in the Balearics and in Valencia: Miquel Àngel Riera, Bartomeu Fiol, Miquel Bauçà and Ponç Pons in the islands, and Josep Piera, Marc Granell and Enric Sòria from the Valencian area.

It has become famous, that passage in Flaubert's Parrot where Julian Barnes says that "the past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat", from which we gaze at the land through "a set of telescopes". Certainly, the closer we are to what we are looking at, the more scruples we have when the moment comes to describe and sum it up; whereas things that are a long way off we can dispatch quite happily with a single phrase. In my exposé, (which has obviously gone on lengthening the closer I have come to the present) I have now reached the decades of the eighties and nineties, which are those in which the older poets of this anthology began to publish and to acquire their reputations. It will be simpler, therefore, for me to speak about this period by concentrating on the poets I have chosen, whose skilful and diverse character seems to me to represent the multi-faceted nature of recent Catalan poetry. One thing is clear: Ferrater's prophecy, happily, has not yet been fulfilled: "Madame" is alive and well, and poetry in our language aspires to being taken for granted as a normal phenomenon, just as it is in any other country.

SIX (POSSIBLE) CATALAN POETS

Tracing a map of Catalan poetry of recent years is a difficult task since no summary can do justice to the diversity of styles that co-exist in published collections, journals and public readings, all of which include not only the poets of recent generations but also the older ones, whose longevity and energy mean that they are still present, simultaneously, alongside younger voices, often acting as their mentors. In countries where everyone obeys the same aesthetic dictat it must be easy enough to assemble a composite picture and to detail the small variants: in Catalonia, Valencia and Mallorca, however, there are so many actively-writing poets and with such divergent agendas that any synthesis is impossible. Today, the close proximity in time and space of, for example, extraordinary adventures such as the experimental exercises by Victor Sunyol (born 1955), the dense and exquisite symbolism of Susanna Rafart (born 1962), the Mallarmean work of Albert Roig (born 1959) or the daring and critical constructions of Sebastià Alzamora (born 1972), to name but a few (and any of the previously mentioned still writing), is proof enough, in spite of the fine prose being written here – Valéry was listened to in the end – that Catalonia is above all a land of poets; and, it should be added, of poets who are very jealous of their creative independence. Having to choose, therefore, only six to be at once representative, varied and of the first water, constituted, because of excess and not because of any defect, an authentic embarras de choix. My final option was to choose six poets, five men and one woman: four Catalans, one Valencian and one Mallorcan, who were born between 1963 and 1972 and who, although they lived through the tail end of the dictatorship, had been formed under a democratic regime. Taken together, their work could not be more modern, comprehensive or polyphonic: in the writing of all six, the reader will find politics and history cohabiting with the intimate experience of love (both heterosexual and homoerotic), learned allusion and popular image, stanzaic rigour and freedom of form, the song to the land of one's birth and hymn to the voyage, doubt over the expressive possibilities of language together with pride in the blazing word fuelled by enthusiasm or by anger. The reader will judge to what point they share, as I think, the secrets of the self-same art, and at the same time to what point they are singular and unique. Let us look at them, then, one by one.

CARLES TORNER (born Barcelona, 1963) is an outstanding exponent of poetic engagement against inequality and political violence. Written when he was only twenty, his first books, A la ciutat blanca (In the White City, 1984) and Als límits de la sal (On the Frontiers of Salt, 1985) already reveal a predilection for the formal side of his craft, with the poetry of J. V. Foix as model, a fact that explains his preference for strict forms such as the sonnet and for a concision of expression and a liking for archaisms. Coinciding in time with Torner's aligning and afiliating himself with cultural initiatives such as the secretariat of Catalan PEN or the NGO in support of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, his collection, L'àngel del saqueig (The Plundering Angel, 1989) also marked a change in his writing, now completely devoted to building a sensibility alert always to the "piercing pain / on the altar of memory", which is a consequence of the injustice of the world ('The Plundering Angel'). The poet is in the final analysis attentive to the cries of those who suffer, whether of the "child weeping" here and now, at home ('The Child'), or of the victims of the Balkans War, an armed conflict that would determine the conception of his next book, Viure després (Living Afterwards, 1998), in which the poet has learned that, like Zacharias in the New Testament, he is called to serve the voice he has recovered in order to spread his message. If this collection was triggered by the disasters of Vukovar and Srebrenica, the next book was born out of indignation over the brutal political assassination in 2006 of the Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. La núvia d'Europa (The Bride of Europe, 2008) echoes with the conflicts that shake the planet and destroy the freedom of individuals and peoples, and Torner forges his poetry into a testimony that is at once memorial and denunciation. The poem 'Untranslating Europe' is the cornerstone: a tour de force in which lines by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski bring the poetic voice to an intense reflection on linguistic diversity and cultural and historical frontiers. His undisguisedly religious humanism on the one hand, and a tireless solidarity with the humiliated and wronged on the other, mean that he is close to predecessors such as Verdaguer or Salvat-Papasseit, and makes logical the presence of Biblical motifs with rebellious proclamations, under such unequivocal banners as "in the face of fear, the only truth's a scream" ('Device'). Given the mingling of ethical conscience and emotion, it is no surprise to find that one of his finest registers is the elegiac, as exemplified in a deeply moving poem like 'The Red Van', written in memory of the Jewish poet, Yael Langella.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface,
Introduction,
CARLES TORNER,
Biography,
"Let us think death into the centre of life ...",
The Child,
The Plundering Angel,
Just Before the Fire,
Circus,
Objects,
Device,
The Red Van,
Abraham's Gesture,
Untranslating Europe,
GEMMA GORGA,
Biography,
Going Back,
Horoscope,
The Aged Penelope Speaks,
Stones,
Joyeux Noël,
Rest,
We Forgot,
Phosphorus,
Little Story,
Landing,
Amusement Park,
The Sky Above Berlin,
Long Journey,
Distance,
A Woman,
Pomegranate,
Book of Minutes (extracts),
MANUEL FORCANO,
Biography,
"As dusk gathers and deepens ...",
"In bed, when the light is gone ...",
"My love is ...",
"It is always night ...",
Ephraim's Wood,
Trompe l'Oeil,
Late,
At Night,
At the Archaeological Museum in Damascus,
Trebizond,
Exile,
Pindar's House,
The Roses of Isfahan,
Poetica,
Assault,
Ombra mai fu,
At the Café Sahel in Aleppo,
At Last,
Law Governing Aliens,
Walking Through The Call,
JOSEP LLUÍS AGUILÓ,
Biography,
Songs from the Helm, XII,
The Secret Library,
The Devil's Bridges,
Parallelisms,
The Season of Shadows,
Words,
Lucifer,
The Attic,
Minotaur,
The Flying Dutchman,
I Have Lost a Few Lines,
Tumbleweed,
Reader,
The Contract,
ELIES BARBERÀ,
Biography,
Unlucky Mickey Mouse,
Autumn Leaves,
The Coward's Hymn,
Oratory,
Ashes to Ashes,
Earliest Smell,
20 Nov 75, Day Of Ponds,
Emeralds,
Archaeologist,
Sister Anorexia,
Industrial Estate,
JORDI JULIÀ,
Biography,
Glances,
Toffee,
Saturday Men,
The Forbidden City,
Bad Readers,
Through Jungles and Deserts,
The Pleasure Principle,
Tortoises,
Children's Song,
Deep in the Flesh,
Looking for Roots,
Older Cousins,
The Hidden Bird,
When You Are Sad,
About the Editor and Translator,