Cristóbal Serra, an ironic and elusive sage

The kind reader will allow me to begin this praise of Cristóbal Serra by remembering the edition I made of his complete work (Ars Quimérica, Bitzoc, 1996).

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
08 October 2022 Saturday 01:51
6 Reads
Cristóbal Serra, an ironic and elusive sage

The kind reader will allow me to begin this praise of Cristóbal Serra by remembering the edition I made of his complete work (Ars Quimérica, Bitzoc, 1996). Hence my enthusiasm with the initiative of Wunderkammer and Nadal Suau, which updates that first collection, sustains the presence of our author and once again sponsors the influence of his literary work.

The reader who does not know Cristóbal Serra (Palma de Mallorca, 1922-2012), or has read him fragmentarily, will find in Nadal Suau's informed and panoramic prologue the semblance of a cultured, refined and self-absorbed writer, oblivious to the hustle and bustle of the social life and faithful to the genealogy of his literary heritage.

Serra could join the list of the rare ones gathered by Rubén Darío or Pere Gimferrer. Without losing sight of the fact that his singular literature comes from a hermetic introspection, from the sudden flashes of the mystical tradition and from the pointillist exploration of lost wisdom.

The reader will be surprised that two writers so notable and so opposed in their literary personality have emerged from the concise territory of Andratx. Baltasar Porcel, with his impetuous romance, fascinated by Nietzschean violence, the wild drive of sex, the virulence of desire and the heroism of a fierce rivalry. And Serra, so attentive to the subtleties encrypted in gnomic literature, with an ironic and elusive gentleness, infatuated and severely moved by the wisdom tradition of hidden books.

In the memoirs of Cristóbal Serra (Augurio Hipocampo, Diario de Signos, Las lineas de mi vida…) the memories, images and sensations lit up in the port of Andratx, the mythical region of his childhood and the place where everything began, are made up. The emergence of the authors who formed the backbone of his literary canon, the performance of the characters that impressed his sensitivity, the nostalgia that in his early years coined the melancholy of a peaceful and fruitful existence.

At the border of the port of Andratx (a place now destroyed) came the cosmopolitan messengers of unpublished or prohibited books, the transhumant foreigners who inspired Serra's literary apprenticeship. Thus, among sea urchins, octopuses and conches, fish and fishermen, a youth passed encouraged by Blake, Chesterton, Claudel, La Rochefoucauld, Michaux...

He was a solitary observer of creation and a solipsist who probed the world around him through books. His predilection for aphorism, brevity, and sentence was matched by the benevolent caution and hermitlike calling of his alter ego. But his interest in contemplative literature did not prevent him from getting along with great angry or hurtful satirists. If the ruthless post-war repression had not caught him in puberty he might have emulated an angry preacher like Leon Bloy or a snarky one like Jonathan Swift. Of the two he was a passionate translator.

With that sense of humor that for him was a table of redemption, he tried to avoid the tragic pitfalls of his century. His gentle humor, which is closer to a smile than a laugh, and a certain British style (we are talking about what was previously understood as such) gave him the distinction that characterizes his prose.

Throughout his 90 years, Serra was discovered repeatedly (by Octavio Paz, by Rafael Conte, by Beatriz de Moura...) without ever moving from his spot. When the cartoonist Pere Joan transferred his Journey to Cotyledonia to graphic narrative, he discovered many of his young readers as the old man who spoke of the dark night of Jonah, of the visions of Ana Catalina Emmerick and of the Essenes buried in Qumram. Today's reader will find in The Pendulum Voyage that contemporary Cathar who faced the desperation of the world with delicate tenderness and the writer who rescued from antiquity the cosmic and prophetic character of the donkey, the central figure of an archaic, invisible and unnoticed religion.