Okay, lying on the beach is perhaps the prototypical summer vacation, yes, and now we could praise the beach and the sea, which caresses us with its breeze and moderates the heat, and the horizons that inspire us with adventures. A little imagination, please. Or not, because the truth is that just as in this poem Josep Carner (1884-1970), the Prince of Poets, does not draw extraordinary adventures, his sonnet allows us to travel as far as we want.
On the beach there is a man who observes the sail of a ship, he does not get up but lying down remains in "infinite leisure". What if it's a pirate ship lost in time? Or a distracted smuggler, in full view of the whole world, or even an emulator of that Enric Blanco who in 1930, with his wife and seven-year-old daughter, crossed the ocean from Boston to Barcelona on the Evalú sailboat and a few months then left forever until he ended up in Tahiti? (It is told by Martí Crespo in Barcelona-Tahiti, which ViBop has just published.) It doesn't matter, now a “grooved wave” wakes us up and we return to the fine sand. Clouds and wind make the heat more tolerable.
Let us listen to the sea, which speaks to us and brings us all the stories that have passed in it, and perhaps, as the poem says, we will leave behind all "trace of poverty" and "longing" to face ourselves and "a pure secret de natura”, and here the poet does the pirouette and links permanence and variation: that “vague smile of what lasts” with the “changes around identity”. And we can take as many turns as we want, but from the seashore everything can be at the same time light and dense like the sonnet, and precisely this dolce far niente accompanies us from the outside in, helps us to see, for example, the work of the that we rest with a little smile, why not? and meanwhile think about the changes that surround us, some due to the passing of the years, for example, others because things are going that way and even some changes will be those that we will want and those that our identity asks of us. An abstract thought from the figuration of the landscape.
The editor and poet Jordi Cornudella –who has offered us the translation of the sonnet into Spanish– recommends reading Carner not only to understand the world outside but especially the interior, as we can do by reading this poem.
Catalan version, here
