The Ciutat de Palma poetry prize for a work translated into Catalan sparks controversy

The awarding of the Ciutat de Poesia Prize to a work written in Spanish and later translated into Catalan has sparked a heated debate about whether the ruse used by the winner, Jorge Fernández Gonzalo, is appropriate or not and deserves the 12,000 euros with which he is endowed with the award that bears the name of the poet Joan Alcover.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
30 January 2023 Monday 14:32
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The Ciutat de Palma poetry prize for a work translated into Catalan sparks controversy

The awarding of the Ciutat de Poesia Prize to a work written in Spanish and later translated into Catalan has sparked a heated debate about whether the ruse used by the winner, Jorge Fernández Gonzalo, is appropriate or not and deserves the 12,000 euros with which he is endowed with the award that bears the name of the poet Joan Alcover.

The mayor of Palma, José Hila, was in charge of presenting the Joan Alcover prize to Ecogrames, the winning collection of poems. The jury valued the luminosity of the book, with very powerful natural and biological images, where the human being is the center of everything in relation to the process of being light, an unprecedented theme within poetry and with an open ending”, but suspicions began when the winner of the award collected the prize and did not say a single word in Catalan.

Several women writers from the islands began to doubt the author, such as Miquel Angel Llauger, and the controversy spread with such intensity through social networks that the author has acknowledged that he wrote the work in Spanish and then translated it, something that has already been validated the criticism of the Association of Writers in the Catalan Language.

At first, the eyes will be on the jury, formed by the writers, Antonina Canyelles, Elm Puig Mir, Emili Sánchez-Rubio and Sergio Fernández, but the Deputy Mayor of Culture, Antoni Noguera, acknowledges that it is a problem in the bases, since they do not close the possibility that translated works are presented.

The bases indicate that the works that compete must be original and unpublished, with free themes and written in Catalan. They must have a minimum of 300 verses and a maximum of 800. The name of the person should not appear on the document; otherwise, the work will be discarded. This is the key to ensuring that all eyes are on the bases and not on the jury.

111 works were presented to the poetry prize this year and the winner was controversial. 68 works opted for the novel and the prize was void, according to a jury made up of Sebastià Perelló, Begoña Méndez, Antoni Arencón Arias, Marina de Caso and Francesc Mesperuza Rotger. The gastronomy one was also deserted and the journalism one only opted for nine works.

The PP has taken advantage of the controversy to announce that it will modify the bases in the event that it is governed from May, since only works written in Spanish can be submitted to these categories. For the moment, those responsible for culture at Palma City Council have also announced a change in the rules, but to clarify that novels translated into Catalan from other languages ​​will not be eligible for the award.