One day, it must have been in 1982 or 1983, Albert Rossich, an expert on Francesc Vicenç Garcia, the Rector of Vallfogona, picked up the phone, and he couldn't have been more surprised: a young man called Enric Casasses (then Casassas ), who told him that he wrote verses and asked if he would like to stay with him to talk about the baroque poet. So they did. It was not at all common for a writer to be interested in a poet who was then more of a myth than anything else.
And despite the importance he had had, the great poet of the Catalan Baroque, who was called "Catalan Virgil", "the phoenix of Catalonia" or "a gift from the muses" had not been published with ownership until now, when Rossich has presented the first volume of his complete work, Poesia completa. Sonnets and tenths (Barcino), and which incorporates three unpublished sonnets, in addition to several poems that only appeared in some anthologies. The second volume, with the rest of the metrical forms, is planned for next year, while the third and final volume, which will include drama, prose and perhaps attributed poems, is not yet known when it will be published. It should also be taken into account that it is the first time since 1845 that a complete edition has been made, although some anthologies had appeared.
The edition is part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the writer's death, which in addition to various shows and outreach events has also included the publication of the biography written by Enric Querol, Francesc Vicent Garcia , baroque poet. Life and mysteries of the Rector of Vallfogona (Rafael Dalmau Editor), a whole source to trace the trajectory between the myth and the real personage.
In the words of the editor of Barcino, Oriol Magrinyà, in an event this Wednesday at the Academy of Good Letters, with the edition of the complete work, the great historical anomaly that readers could not read a such an important classic. Magrinyà does not hesitate to describe it as "a historical edition, which marks a before and after", and assures that without renouncing the academic reader it is "accessible to all readers, who will find tools to understand and enjoy it ".
As Rossich recalls, Garcia is "the central poet between Ausiàs Marc and Jacint Verdaguer" and modernizer of Catalan poetry. The fact is, however, that the character of his poetry, especially satirical and burlesque – a typical trait of the Baroque, just as Góngora and Quevedo did in Spanish – contributed at the same time to undermining it, a fact that went even further when he became so popular that anecdotes were told everywhere that often had nothing to do with his life. Confusions that have reached the point that until a few years ago the date and place of his birth (January 22, 1579 in Zaragoza) was not known. After the dazzling success, however, first a certain Renaissance and then the Noucentism caused his figure to become blurred, not to mention the fact that many of the editions that have been made so far are full of poems censored – often for considering them erotic or immoral – as well as numerous poems were apocryphal, attributed to him but not written by him.
Thus, one of Rossich's first difficulties was to determine which poems had an assured authorship, but although "it is possible that there is some poem that is not his or that some other poem written by him has not been included, this it is a rigorous proposal made after a lot of reflection and work".
