When you began writing in Catalan in the seventies, you frequently addressed the tentative or unfinished nature of Catalan identity, particularly in linguistic terms. In one essay, you remark that Catalan survived suppression under Primo de Rivera and Franco thanks to the language’s prestige among the cultured classes.
In verse, I’ve only rarely looked at these things, once in a bittersweet line in Castell de Puresa (Castle of Purity) – So many men dead for the gold of a senyera1 / perhaps for an apocryphal light – that is a direct allusion. There are others that are more fragmentary. In Tropic of Cancer:
A final fringe in dark Montjuïc,
the gloom and smoke of firing squads, the lighthouse, the lapping of water
This was censored in early editions because it was an explicit reference to the shooting of Lluis Companys and others. It’s a passing allusion, but its meaning was obvious to readers at the time.
As a language of culture, Catalan reached a very high point, one of the highest in Europe, from the twelfth or thirteenth to the fifteenth century, starting with Ramon Llull and ending with Tirant lo Blanch, Ausias March, and a number of other writers, particularly from Valencia, Joan Roís de Corella, among others. In terms, not of the number of writers, but of their expressive mastery, Catalan literature was one of the most important in Europe. After that, Catalan largely disappears as a language of culture. There are interesting odds and ends from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but it is not until the nineteenth century that it really reemerges, in a work of singular ambition: L’Atlàntida (Atlantis) by Jacint Verdaguer. Leaving aside its peculiar subject – the celebration of the Spanish conquest of America – it represents an effort at modernisation in two senses: as an attempt first to reclaim the literary language from the deterioration it had suffered over the course of three centuries, and second to address a kind of aesthetic stagnation. This was a serious task, and not entirely successful: Verdaguer wasn’t out of step with the times, but he was working in a language not yet well adapted to his purposes. Joan Maragall, more or less Verdaguer’s contemporary, made similar exertions in this direction, but – if we can play a little loose with chronology – both were, like Machado and Unamuno in Spanish, more poets of the nineteenth century than of the twentieth.
The situation only really changes with Carles Riba and J.V. Foix – these were men who wrote the same kind of poetry being written elsewhere in Europe at the time. Riba has many points in common with Rilke. Foix was associated for a time with the futurists, he was a friend of Marinetti’s, but he would soon ally with surrealism, with Paul Éluard. Foix’s renovation of the language was at once brilliant and quixotic: since Catalan had reached its apogee in the fifteenth century, he chose to take the fifteenth century as his point of departure. And so his poetry is a curious blend of medieval language – not of a grotesque kind, not just choosing any old medieval word, his idiom is not at all artificial in this way – and the language of people from the countryside, in particular from Port de la Selva, where he had a home and would go swim and spend the summers. His expressions resonate with surrealism and with the pure psychic automatism of Breton and Dalí, but you can tease out their meaning looking back to poets like Góngora. He could explain every one of his images to you clearly. Maybe he came up with these explanations after writing them, I don’t know, but they were always coherent.
There is a difficulty with Foix: he was allied with the right whereas surrealism – with the marked exception of Dalí – was a movement of the left, and so even if people admire his work, he is a difficult model to follow. Other poets come after him, nurtured by his work as well as by Verdaguer and Maragall. Two, in my judgment, are major writers: Gabriel Ferrater, the only Catalan poet whose work resembles Auden’s, and Joan Brossa, who follows in Foix’s footsteps, but stripping away the archaisms – writing in the language of everyday people and the working classes, but with completely surreal images. Does that answer the question?
Yes, well…
Now, what all of them are after is very clear: the Catalan language should not only go on existing, but should achieve the same literary distinction it had in the fifteenth century. And that, in my opinion, was something they accomplished even before the war. That proved problematic for Franco. Suppressing a dialect is not the same thing as suppressing a language that is a vehicle of culture. With Catalan, there were all sorts of restrictive measures, but if a person writes like Riba or like Foix, and these things appear in print runs of a hundred copies, well, that’s something linguistic politics aren’t well equipped to combat. We’re not talking about direct militancy in the Neruda manner, but the perpetuation of the language following vanguardist models at a time when the language was prohibited.
Catalan is your mother language, but you began writing in Spanish.
Can you talk a bit about your linguistic background?
I understand mother language to mean the language one learns the names of things in – not all things, obviously. So that came first. Then I was educated in Spanish. This education in Spanish was almost simultaneous with my education in Latin and in French. When I was young, I met Vicente Aleixandre, Octavio Paz, and Rafael Alberti, poets who wrote in Spanish, but at seventeen or eighteen, I also met Foix and Brossa and Ferrater, each of whom traced out very different paths in Catalan. But another thing is, cinema had immense importance for me. If you get used to watching movies in the original, you already live in a multilingual world. When I was thirteen – I’m not making this up – I had the sense that living in Spain at that moment was rather uninteresting, and the easiest thing for me was to pretend I was a French boy from the provinces, and that was the way I would read Cahiers de cinema, which was brilliant in those days. This was a mental game of mine, to try and read it as if I were actually in Tours or Rouen – not the capital, but these smaller cities, which produced their own great writers.
The theme of cultural backwardness has been important in Spain from the Generation of ’98 up to Carlos Rojas and Juan Benet nearly a century later. You yourself say of Verdaguer that he was a contemporary of Mallarmé and Rimbaud but patterned his writing on Hugo. When did Catalan literature catch up with the times?
More than backwardness, I would call it a chronological imbalance. You point out Verdaguer, but I wouldn’t saddle him with this, this is a generalised problem in Spain and in Spanish poetry in America – not so much in Portuguese, the evolution of Portuguese and Brazilian literature is different for any number of reasons. The pattern starts to undo itself with Rubén Darió in America and, not long afterward, with Juan Ramón Jiménez in Spain. It’s significant that Darío, when he publishes his most cosmopolitan book, Los Raros, which examines a number of European figures, had not yet been to Europe: everything he discusses he has either read or knows from photographs and prints. With him and with Juan Ramón Jiménez we enter an aesthetic era that marks a break with Verdaguer or Machado or Unamuno.
In your book on Tàpies, you say that modern art is defined by the disappearance of theme as an external motif – by the dissolution of the traditional hierarchy of motifs. Is your poetry modern in this sense?
This theme of the disappearance of the exterior, that isn’t really my phrase, it’s an idea from André Breton. Breton saw the disappearance of the exterior as pertaining above all to poetry; it is apparent in some ways in the plastic arts as well, but distinctly, because surrealist art remained figurative, if not realistic.
As to whether this applies to my own poetry, the relation is a bit strange. My poetry has passed through many stages. I’ve never considered it classical; there were times when I have attempted to grant it a semblance of classicism, but only a semblance; whole books of mine give this impression, but their internal functioning isn’t classical – it’s as if they were a pastiche of classical poetry serving to conceal a modern approach. There are precedents for this, Fernando Pessoa, for example, did this in several languages.
Does the eroticism of your poetry correspond to what Octavio Paz calls ‘the rebellion of the body’?
Paz says that in an important book, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, in a study of the Rokeby Venus of Velazquez. This is the only painting of its type by Velazquez, and was a private commission, probably for the Count-Duke of Olivares. There is a mirror in the painting, remember? And the most intriguing aspect is compositional, the way the mirror reveals this strange symmetry between the buttocks of the Venus and the face in the mirror, which we don’t see. Octavio Paz dilates on this at great length. It was a topic that concerned him at the end of the seventies, and is clearly related to the social changes we all know as well as aspects of surrealism, with which Paz had deep contacts, he corresponded with Breton, knew Benjamin Peret in Mexico, Miró, and so on. This symmetry does have a certain importance for me.
Can you say something about the influence of Ramon Llull on your work?
Ramon Llull is a difficult figure to grasp. Leaving aside his ontological, philosophical orientation, and his enormous importance for the language – despite being the first to really write literature in Catalan, he does it with utter mastery… leaving this aside, he possesses an extraordinary visionary momentum. If you’re not immersed in his world, maybe you don’t understand what each of his phrases means, but their force still comes across. ‘No man is visible’, don’t ask me what it means, to all appearances it’s the very opposite of true. Claudio Guillén discusses that quote in relation my book Fortuny, drawing a parallel between Llull’s ‘No man is visible’ and my own phrase, ‘The eye denies to the eye the vision in the eye’s depths.’ I can’t say there is a direct influence because he is from a different world, Lull is a medieval theologian. But the impact of his images themselves is exceptional.
You have remarked, about writing in several languages, that the choice is not conscious, that certain rhythms suggest certain languages and vice versa.
Well, many writers have written in different languages, look at Ezra Pound. In theory, he wrote in English. Still, large parts of his books aren’t in English. A better example is Pessoa. Not only did he write in Portuguese, English and French, but in these languages, he was four or five different poets. I haven’t tried to establish heteronyms proper like Pessoa, but I have at times attempted to differentiate the personae writing my poems, to keep them from seeming too similar, and language does play a role here. I don’t know as many languages as I would like, but I read in eight or nine, and doing so inclines you to try them out. I wrote a plaquette in French and a fair bit of prose, one book in Italian, everything else is Spanish and Catalan, I haven’t tried my hand at others.
So no book in English?
No book in English, in Portuguese, even less in Latin, which is the language I have studied most. Well, you can never say, I hadn’t planned to write a book in Italian, but one day I did. I don’t think I would write in Portuguese, Provençal, or English, but I don’t know, it depends on the circumstances. I wrote the Italian book in at a time when I was travelling to Italy, I had been reading a lot of Italian literature and watching Italian films, I don’t know if this could happen with English or Portuguese, but I can’t rule it out.
Is your poetry abstract?
I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. What makes you ask?
I suppose there are two ways to interpret poetry. If it’s abstract, there’s not really a hermeneutic entryway, but if not, the reader has to look for those clues, try to understand…
This is a question that can be traced back to a specific moment, when Rimbaud, in Illuminations and A Season in Hell, does something no one had done before, or not rigorously: he treats words as a painter treats colour, or as a musician treats sounds. As abstractions, in other words, for their plastic, sonic, visual qualities. And many people follow in his footsteps. This idea, which he perhaps didn’t formulate coherently, is astonishing: he opens a road to a place where words no longer matter semantically, and you have to make an effort to forget what they mean in normal or philosophical language; he treats them like sounds or colours, and this evem makes you see the painting and the music that came before them in a new way. This was revolutionary, and its effects are evident in certain of my poems, where allusions don’t need to be tracked down, but instead serve a kind of atmospheric purpose.
1 The senyera is the Catalan flag, widely seen as a symbol for the Catalan people.