"It is essential to remember that Ferrater did not hesitate to present himself as a writer, as a poet and as a linguist whenever he could, but he never spoke of himself as a literary critic or as a historian of literature ". It is Jordi Cornudella, publisher of Gabriel Ferrater. Papers on literature (Editions 62), which explains the encounters of the poet from Reus, author of Les women and the days.
Cornudella knows that this book turns Ferrater into an inescapable literary reference. The work greatly expands, with 200 unpublished pages out of 600, the volume Sobre literatura, which his brother Joan Ferraté published in 1979, and which he completed with later works. "In his lifetime, Gabriel Ferrater only published poetry - explains Cornudella to La Vanguardia - and his brother divided his subsequent work into three major areas: literature, painting and language".
Cornudella acknowledges: "These papers on literature are a betrayal. They turn Ferrater into the critic or historian that he did not want to be, and make him the author of a work that is not a work and that we are fairly certain that he did not want it to be. Bargains of posterity”. This "work that is not work" is what the editor has tried to make very clear, identifying each text in detail, so that the current reader knows the context and the intention of how they were written, whether for public or private purposes.
Cornudella has divided the book into three parts: a first on Catalan literature, a second on personal papers ("Ferrater fent de Ferrater") and a third on other literatures. "The brother differentiated the texts of the lectures and I wanted to preserve this duplicity: in 2019 the Course of Contemporary Catalan Literature was published, which is the collection of lectures he had given on various writers (Riba, Foix, Guerau de Liost ...), and now the texts we already knew plus a bunch we found, which had never been published. Now we need to collect all the reading reports and all the articles he wrote in Spanish for a dictionary of Salvat writers, which remain unpublished”.
The most unique and unpublished writings in this volume are those in the third part, dedicated to other literatures: "The Labor publishing house published a history of literature by a German author, Erwin Laaths, to which were added texts by other authors. Ferrater was in charge of expanding with interesting information for the reader here the articles of a few foreign authors that Laaths had already included. By comparing the German and Spanish editions, we have managed to find out what Ferrater added".
"Another unpublished is an extensive article entitled Notes on the poetry of Josep Carner - he continues -, which we found thanks to the collaboration of Mercè Comas, the daughter of Antoni Comas, who found two letters between her father and Ferrater that they were talking about, and that gave us the clue. This article served him for a dictionary entry that was not published and for the famous prologue to Nabí. It is a piece of big game, as is also the part of Ausiàs March, which had a great influence on his own work”.
The main conclusion of this volume is that "although Gabriel Ferrater never published anything of literary criticism or literary history, he had a decisive influence on the formation of the modern canon: neither Carner nor Foix would occupy the place that they occupy today in Catalan literature if he had not warned us", he concludes.
