Exploring Catalan Literature - Part Three: The 1970’s Onwards

George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia was published in1938, a year after the Spanish Civil War had ended. It was his profoundly personal account of the time he spent fighting for the P.O.U.M militia of the Republican army. Orwell believed his experience to be a defining moment in his political outlook and said in 1946, ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it’. His creative energies had been both catalysed, and shaped by his outraged response to, and experience of…war.

Ernest Hemingway once said, ‘There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed’. With Orwell in mind, and the sentiment of Hemingway’s quote absorbing my thoughts, I asked Tiago Miller how Catalonia’s heinously oppressive recent past had shaped the outpourings of their newly liberated pens. He responded:

“During the 1970s, we see authors picking up the thread of Catalan literature where it had been ruthlessly cut by war and dictatorship, however, the nascent Catalanism at the turn of the century is now being adapted to socialist and feminist ideas. As a result, we see a lot of social realism in fiction that explores war, dictatorship and exile from the viewpoint of els vençuts (the defeated), often from the viewpoint of female characters, and there are a number of important, highly literary memoirs published during the same period.

cq[In the immediate aftermath of the Transition, both Madrid and Barcelona saw the emergence of highly artistic, (and drug-fuelled) undergrounds...]

Another important strain is experimental narrative fiction and poetry. In the immediate aftermath of the Transition, both Madrid and Barcelona saw the emergence of highly artistic, (and drug-fuelled) undergrounds, and in the Catalan capital. This is perhaps best represented by the novels of Joan Barceló, the poetry of Pepe Sales (the nephew of Joan Sales, author of Uncertain Glory) and the art of José Pérez Ocaña, all of whom died tragically young.

There was a huge growth in the number of books published in Catalan and an important number of publishing houses were founded, while many more modernised their working practices to adapt to the new reality in Catalonia, turning Barcelona into the modern publishing capital of Spain. This growth continued in the 1980s and 1990s due to Catalan becoming the official language at state schools and universities. Consequently we see the emergence of literary bestsellers by authors such as Emili Teixidor and Jesús Moncada in the 80s, Sergi Pàmies and Quim Monzó in the 90s, and Baltasar Porcel and Jaume Cabré in the new millennium.”

Given the plethora of Catalan literature produced during the last half century, I was keen to understand Tiago’s subjective take on which authors of this period he personally considered to be particularly significant, and elaborate upon the reasons for his choices:

“Well, I guess it could be any of the authors mentioned above. I would say Quim Monzó, Enric Casasses, Mercè Ibarz and Montserrat Roig. These are perhaps the authors that have moved me most, or helped me discover other writers, or made me a better translator.

Perhaps Quim Monzó might seem an obvious choice to some readers but recently I read his novel Benzina (Gasoline) and I thought it was outstanding. Funny, intelligent, satirical, angry, absurd… it has everything. He’s better known as a short story writer, and indeed some of his shorter work is excellent, but I enjoyed reading him in a longer format. I love how he analyses drab, quotidian existence, making endless lists and comparisons to arrive at a dubious and highly subjective truth, meanwhile scrutinising the intricacies of the 80s New York art scene.

It’s a world of imprisoned characters who exist somewhere between caricature and genuine drama in a succession of grotesque situations that reveal and revel in the contradictions and absurdities of much of what we do. The whole time I imagined Monzó striding around New York as some sort of neurotic, twitching postmodern flâneur. It was translated into English in 2010 by Mary Ann Newman, who’s not only a sublime translator, but was hanging out with Monzó in New York in the 80s.”

Our first encounters with truly exceptional literature, burn themselves into our minds and stand out in our memories like candescent hilltop fire beacons lighting a pitch-black midnight sky. I wanted Tiago to share one such moment...

“I first came across the multi-award-winning poet Enric Casasses by accident. I can’t remember how, why or with whom, but I found myself listening to his 2006 album La manera més salvatge, made with the French multi-instrumentalist and composer Pascal Comelade, in which he reads his poetry over distorted electric guitar. It reminded me of those televised readings Kerouac did to jazz piano only way, way cooler, perhaps the coolest thing I’d heard in Catalan. You know when something just fits, it feels so right, as if it just had to exist precisely in this form?

Well that’s how I felt and still feel about that album. I always dip in and out of his work whenever I can, whether it’s his books or his albums. I don’t claim to know much about poetry and I certainly don’t pretend to understand much of Casasses’ work, but whenever I read or listen to him I’m able to just sit back and let the sounds of the words wash over me. In fact, he makes me glad to have learnt Catalan more than any other writer.

His second album N’ix, sounds more like a rock album, and the crashing guitars and the way it almost sounds as if he’s singing always makes me think of the post-punk group The Fall. He’s done four albums, the most recent in 2018, which contains poems from his book El nus la Flor, which won him two of the most important poetry prizes in Catalonia. His work covers the entire history of Catalan poetry, all the way back to poets of the 15th century, and I remember reading how he’s the natural heir to the poets Foix, Brossa and Ferrater. High praise indeed.”

Catalonia’s authors offer us an infinite variety of voices and stylist forms to savour. I asked Tiago to give an example of another writer he admires to illustrate this coruscating spectrum.

“I’m a huge fan of Mercè Ibarz for completely different reasons to Casasses. Her prose is incisive in a quiet, studied way and often you’re carried away by the subtle power of her writing, like an invisible undercurrent. She’s a journalist, novelist, short story writer and biographer, and is equally as good in each of these genres because she writes with such respect and love for the written word and narrative construction.

She’s published biographical works on Mercè Rodoreda, Luis Buñuel and the futurist poet Joan Salvat-Papasseit, novels that explore the changing sociological reality of agricultural communities in rural Lleida, and short stories concerned with the conflict between the internal and external world, in which the city of Barcelona is presented almost as a protagonist. I’ve seen her speak a few times in Lleida and she’s such a warm, insightful, elegant woman, and she’s proof that a truly great writer can adapt his or herself to any format.”

Reading Tiago’s translation of The Song Of Youth by Montserrat Roig, fired my own nascent passion for Catalan literature. I asked Tiago where her oeuvre stands in his estimation, and why he holds this view.

“What can I say?...she’s greatness personified. She’s to Catalan literature what Patti Smith is to punk rock – sure, their styles are chalk and cheese, but there’s a rebellion, a power, a directness in both their writing. Not only did Roig write in a variety of styles and genres, from investigative journalism, memoirs, short stories, novels and feminist theory, but she also did it from a critical position, from the outside, while bringing up two kids in economically precarious circumstances.

...a truly outstanding piece of writing and someone surely has to put it out in English soon!She’s been a massive influence on me on a personal level: she showed me that I could write and translate while holding down a day job and bringing up my daughter, meanwhile reading and travelling and conversing and living. In short, she taught me that I could do everything I wanted to do and be everything I wanted to be. Anyone who regularly puts out quality work while holding down a full-time job is my hero – if they have kids to bring up as well, then they’re akin to gods in my mind.

There’s certainly the general acknowledgement that Roig was one step ahead of her contemporaries; perhaps the greatest example of this was the book she was commissioned to write on the Siege of Leningrad (L’agulla daurada [The Golden Needle]) which resulted in a work with one foot in investigative journalism, and the other in literary testimony.

It’s a truly outstanding piece of writing and someone surely has to put it out in English soon! It’s not too dissimilar to what Svetlana Alexeievitch was awarded the Nobel Prize for, only that was in 2015 and Roig’s book is from 1985. I’m convinced she would have written some of the greatest European literature of the 20th and 21st centuries had she lived beyond the age of 45.”

Join us aboard our literary “frigate” for the next article in this series in which Tiago and myself discuss Catalan literature being written now, and the myriad creative influences acting upon it. We also discuss the complex and vexatious question of what constitutes the Catalan ‘canon’ and equally contentiously, what does not.

Finally, readers can expect to find out how much of Catalan’s wondrous literature is accessible to non-Catalan speakers, and the bold steps being taken to address this significant point.