Paul Spalding-Mulcock, Features Writer

…And One Wave Follows On From Another: Jacobé & Fineta, By Joaquim Ruyra

One of the sempiternal delights of reading is the serendipitous discovery of yet another authorial voice able to take its place alongside those we already adore. Whilst I return repeatedly to the words of those authors who most nourish my soul, or speak to it as only they can, I live in constant hope of finding new kindreds to add to their invaluable ranks. These new friends may inhabit the pages of almost any book I encounter, and this knowledge is an anticipatory lure catalysing my esurient appetite for that which I have not yet encountered.

Thanks to Fum d’Estampa Press and the sedulous devotion and dexterity of literary translator Alan Yates, I have now met Joaquim Ruyra. Though a necessarily brief encounter, for much of his work remains untranslated into English, Ruyra has joined the cohort of writers I personally hold most dear.

Imagine, if you will, a voice laced with shades of Conrad, Poe and Melville, flickerings of Hemingway and Robert Louis Stevenson, yet authentically distinct. Ruyra’s voice is no derivative echo of those cited above, it is a chord in exquisite harmony with that literary choir and every bit as scintillatingly mellifluous to my enraptured ears.

Joaquim Ruyra (1858-1939) was a Catalan short story writer, poet, translator, literary critic and linguistic scholar who is now considered to be a key figure in Catalan Modernisme and its internationally venerated literature. His construction of a new literary model after 1860, together with his telluric love of place, saw the Catalan language itself become a seminal force for Catalan nationalism per se.

Ruyra is now regarded by some as one of the most gifted narrators of the twentieth century and can be rightly seen as the fons et origo, inspiring the works of Josep Carner, Carles Riba, Josep Pla and Mercè Rodoreda. Salvador Espriu declared himself a literary disciple and went so far as to consider Ruyra, “possibly the greatest writer I have known to date in any language”.

To put this in context, imagine Turgenev and Gogol’s contribution to Russian literature and then consider Modernism’s impact upon the Western canon. Although Modernism emerged in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, its manifestation in Catalan was imbued with the region’s unique personality and socio-ideological values.

As a dynamic agency in its own right, Catalan Modernisme played a monumental role in revitalising Catalan’s sense of self and authentic autonomy. In many ways, we can see this literary development as being similar to other fin de siècle movements and every bit as significant as Art Nouveau as it swept through France, Belgium, Germany, Vienna and Glasgow.

It’s fair to say that Modernisme manifests itself most conspicuously in narrative form. The nouvelles and novels of decadent writers such as Prudenci Bertrana, Caterina Albert - better known as Victor Català - opposed the idealisation of nature promulgated by Catalan Romantics. These works recovered a genre extinguished by political tumult dating back to the Middle Ages.

Though the works of Ruyra may not have been directly influenced by Russian literature of the nineteenth century, or the emergence of the Gothic genre, they certainly contain elements common to both. It is no wonder that his radically innovative slice-of-life tales of the North Eastern Catalan coast, have become an inestimably important foundation stone underpinning or influencing the work of many of Catalan’s most gifted scribes.

So, having sketched out the context in which we can approach Ruyra and his works, let’s move onto examining Jacobé & Fineta. Fum d’Estampa and Yates have given us two short stories which are of course independent artistic entities, yet can be seen as complimentary verses forming a single copacetic poem. Stylistically isomorphic and passing themes back and forth almost by literary metempsychosis, these two tales synergistically enrich each other, whilst dextrously conveying their own individual messages.

In ‘Jacobé’ we have a first person account of the tender then tumultuous relationship between a young boy and his teta, or young nanny. A once sweet girl matures into a comely adolescent only to succumb to an inherited disease which drives her out of her troubled mind. Set within a bucolic seaside fishing village, the ineluctable tendrils of tragedy wrap themselves around Jacobé, pulling her into the abyss of insanity, rendering her antics every more disconcertingly meshuga. Her young charge, Minguet, returns to the village a grown man and must confront the demise of his beloved teta and the impact of her cursed fate upon his own delicate sensibilities.

In ‘Fineta’ we have an artfully intimate third person portrayal of another young girl, Delfina. Left at home alone whilst the men in her family are away at sea fishing, Fineta is irresistibly drawn to the glistening waters of the Mediterranean and decides to take a swim. Unobserved, Fineta revels in the visceral delight of innocent pleasure, finding both solace and affirmation in the baptistic waters anointing her change from girl to woman. Accosted by the Woodsman, a mysterious and sinister interloper, Finita’s sensuality catalyses forces which will forever change her and the world as she understands it.

Ruyra perfectly embodies the words of Joseph Conrad, “A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer”. It is Ruyra’s compassion for his fellow beings that allows his work to hum with humanistic vitality, tenderness and passion. Counterpointing this paradisiacal contemplation of innocence and unsullied natural beauty, is the Poe-like presence of melancholy, ineluctable suffering and iniquitous threat sitting beneath the thin meniscus conjoining cruel fate with idealistic autonomy.

Ruya employs rich symbolism to vitiate innocence, or create bold literary synaesthesia intended to carry his variegated themes into our hearts and minds. The effect of this use of vibrant figurative language suffused with both beauty and its antithesis, is to once again echo Conrad… “My task, which I am trying to achieve, is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-it, before all, to make you see”.

Iterative imagery immerses us in the worlds he creates. Plants, landscapes, the sea itself described with infinite, assiduous care and simultaneously given profoundly poetic meaning. Like Conrad, his descriptions of the sea are truly breathtaking, gaining both noetic and visceral force from the use of motif as metaphor. Again, I found my mind running to Conrad - “In order to move others, we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our natural sensibility”.

As Minguet gazes down upon the sea from his precarious perch on a clifftop path, he observes the waves, putting me in mind of Casper David Friedrich’s painting ‘The Wanderer’. Ruyra captures the naturalism of the moment, whilst driving home his fatalistic ideology subtly modulated by melioristic hope:

“It begins as a tiny wrinkle on the water, hardly noticeable at first, from afar, among so very many others. It comes slowly landwards, persistently onwards…and one wonders if it will ever reach its destination. For a moment, it disappears from view and then reappears, rolling onwards, growing bigger, then enormous…Now it is an imposing bulk of heavy water, alive and throbbing, swelling all the time, like a colossal muscle being ever more tightly flexed….When at its full height it seems to be taking a breath, like a child’s balloon being inflated, then it’s delicate crest turns crystalline spindrift and the whole surge hits the shore with a tremendous crush, jumping and skidding over the shore”.

With his astonishingly powerful lyrical prose Ruyra weaves perspicacious insight and artfully rendered character portrayals into every scene he depicts, suffusing them with poetic sensibility and psychological insight. Turgenev employed much the same technique, and his words perfectly capture Ruyra’s skill… “A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one : he should know and feel the roots of the phenomena themselves in full bloom, or as they fade away”.

Thematically, we explore determinism and fatalism whilst simultaneously confronting the full spectrum of nature’s rhythms as it vacillates from birth to decay, and beauty morphing ineluctably into threatening ugliness. Ruyra offers us these ugly truths without the palliative of romantic idealism, yet he resolutely celebrates life’s irrepressible, but fragile preciousness. He counterpoints unalloyed innocence with the malefic, eldritch forces lurking within mankind’s soul.

Nature, though depicted with tenderly-wrought prosopopoeia, is never simply viewed through a Panglossian cynosure. Ruyra refuses to abrogate reality’s cruellest truths. Both Jacobé and Fineta are unflinching representations of life’s antithetical couplets. Tangible beauty counterpointed by unknowable mystery, innocence coexistent with the unpalatable truths disinterred by experience. Above all, in two short stories, Ruyra gives us a view of the land he loves and the frail creatures who bravely inhabit it.

My appetite for Catalan literature increases with every encounter. Now, I need to hunt down The Long Oar, Ruyra’s only novel translated into English. In the meantime, I hope Fum d’Estampa brings more Ruyra to those of us unlucky enough not to speak his beloved, soul-enriching language!



Jacobé & Fineta is published by Fum d’Estampa