Allow me to start with a very brilliant sentence from the prologue that Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972) wrote for Els loms transparents (1969) by J.V. fox He takes the idea of Carles Riba according to which, in Catalonia "literary generations follow each other and are spent very quickly" and explains that, in an absurd way, Maragall, Ors, Carner and Riba have been read as representatives of different generations. "Not even the best chronological ham-slicing machines would know how to subdivide such thin slices of time."
Behind the irony lies a vision of literature: the cultural history of the country has been built on the automatic pilot of laziness. And hence the persistence of ideas - like that of literary generation - that don't work. We find other images like this: when asked in 1968 if he believed in committed poetry, he replied that "poets tend to enlist"; when in the prologue of The Process (1966) he says that Kafka is a writer who touches the ground and that "it is perhaps a pity to destroy the stories with which the little children of Saint-Germain-des- Près” (the existentialists).
This concrete imagination and irony are one of the attractions of Papers on Literature, which has expanded, tripling, the volume that Joan Ferraté edited in 1979 with the title On Literature. Jordi Cornudella has prepared an impeccable edition that is a work of high culture.
In the opening note, Cornudella states that Gabriel Ferrater's work is a posthumous construction – you already know that he committed suicide at fifty – that he did not see himself as a critic or as a scholar of literature. In this sense, it is significant that the book opens with Madame se meurt, a text that he published in 1953 in an issue on Catalan literature of the magazine Ínsula. Ferrater's thesis is that modern Catalan literature has been linked, from its origins, to poetry - in another text, regarding the death of Carles Riba, he says it with one of the images that I like: "One of the decencies that constitute the exoskeleton of Catalan urban society is respect and esteem for poetry”–.
According to Ferrater there are two renaissances: that of 1830 and that of 1890, which represents a change in orientation towards realism or – put another way – towards stylistic sincerity. The problem, which is not exclusive to Catalan literature, is that this project has failed. Without readers, there is no literature.
Cornudella also points out that it is necessary to differentiate the circumstantial occurrence of the apothegm ("A brief, sententious and happy saying, especially one that is famous for having been uttered or written by some personality", according to the RAE). Papers on literature breathes great irregularity. The pages about Carner, especially, are second to none. With very fine, surprising readings, when, for example, he compares Nabí with Don Quixote in the light of a Freudian reading of the superego – Yahweh is Jonah's superego and Don Quixote is Sancho's superego. The pages she dedicates to J.V. Foix are memorable, for their novelty and depth, which transcends literature. Ferrater considers that Foix's work speaks of the crisis of personality. Faced with the contemporary mania for the construction of a style, Carner is objective and Foix has them all.
Once you have read Ferrater you cannot approach either of them without taking it into account. I have been excited – also in connection with a lot of current literature – reading Maragall that “avorreix la llengua que sap i enyora una llengua that he ignores”, with the corresponding stylistic soup. The outline of contemporary Catalan literature that he wrote in 1958 for José María Valverde shows how readers have overcome Ferrater's prejudices (who trashes Casellas, Víctor Català and Vinyoli). On the other hand, he had the insight to see the greatness of Ramon Raventós and to compare him with Kafka, opening the way to rereadings of the tradition of recent years.
Gabriel Ferrater Papers on literature Edition by Jordi Cornudella Editions 62,616 pages 20.80 euros
