…From The Beloved Soil, Precious Flowers Bloom : Exploring Catalan Literature - Part Five

Tiago Miller, the literary translator who has acted during this series as my gracious guide through the candescent firmament that is Catalan literature, shares something beyond a mere literary linkage with the authors he most venerates. Both Tiago and the writers he adores, share a profound passion for the very soil of Catalonia, its people and their irrepressible, indomitable authenticity.

cq[Maria-Mercè Marçal ... has a special place in my heart and mind, not only for her sheer brilliance as a poet, novelist and critic... she was from Lleida, where I now call home.]

I asked Tiago to share with our readers his thoughts upon four Catalan authors who hold a particularly special place in both his noetic, and emotional heartland. This article focuses upon the first two writers in this sparkling quartet, Maria-Mercè Marçal and Dolors Miquel:

“Maria-Mercè Marçal (1952-1998) has a special place in my heart and mind, not only for her sheer brilliance as a poet, novelist and critic, but because she was from Lleida, where I now call home. Lleida is the forgotten province of Catalonia, and in the coastal metropolitan mindset it represents something between a land of funny-speaking farmers and a type of gun-toting Wild West.

Nevertheless, what many forget is the strong literary tradition in Lleida, of which Marçal is one of the leading figures. Her focus on mythical and ancestral imagery rooted in the primitive elements of air, water, earth and fire draw directly from her upbringing in rural Ivars d’Urgell.

Marçal’s first book of poems was published in 1976, a year after Franco’s death, so she was beginning her literary career at a time of political and social upheaval. Her first works drew heavily on socialist and feminist traditions, serving as a direct challenge to the patriarchy and Spanish fascism’s rewriting of Catalan history.

But her evolution as a writer is exceptional – comparable to filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard, whose early works were mere departure points – and she evolves rapidly as an artist to explore themes of individual freedom and identity.”

cq[Marçal’s influences are multitudinous... this book draws heavily on the lyrical folklore and violence of Fernando García Lorca and the avant-garde Catalan poet J.V. Foix.]

Our affection for and appreciation of a particular author, is often rooted in our love of the stylistic and thematic substance of the words they write. The tenacious tendrils climbing from the pages of their works in the form of words, wrap themselves around our souls. I wanted to understand why Marçal’s artistic style and the character of her work, had so ineluctably won Tiago’s everlasting respect and affection:

“If we take her first work Cau de llunes (1976), we find the famous phrase, ‘I’m grateful to fate for three gifts: to be a woman, from the working class and from an oppressed nation’, which constituted a state of rebellion for Marçal, and it’s a real ‘phoenix moment’ for Catalan literature. Her second work Bruixa de dol (1979) came out a year after the first feminist conferences in Spain, during which the movement demonstrated not only its strength and validity, but also its ability to be at the forefront of the social, political, economic and, perhaps most importantly, the conceptual changes necessary for the transition from Francoism to modern democracy.

The book echoes childhood stories and songs of witches on broomsticks, but also mourns those very women who were persecuted and massacred throughout history. There’s also the author’s own personal sadness in the face of her feelings of loneliness and ostracism as a young woman searching for alternatives to stereotypes of traditional femininity. Marçal’s influences are multitudinous, but I think that this book draws heavily on the lyrical folklore and violence of Fernando García Lorca and the avant-garde Catalan poet J.V. Foix.”

Selecting a seminal work, an opus magnum, and denoting it as such can be fraught with nuanced subjectivity and derivative bias. I asked Tiago to tell me which of Marçal’s works he considered to be her crowning glory, knowing his thoughts would indeed be subjective, but that they would be based upon sensitively enriched erudition, not mere literary tradition:

“Her great shining masterpiece is undoubtedly the novel La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994), which stands as a work of high European literature for so many reasons. Firstly, there’s the dense, poetic prose that only a true poet can produce, but the structure also allows for multiple voices to speak from different perspectives and at varying points in Vivien’s biography.

In fact, the novel plays with, and blurs the lines between, fiction, biography and feminist treatise and in this sense the book is a game of mirrors, sort of like the famous scene from The Lady from Shanghai.

But then there’s the title character: born Pauline Mary Tarn in London in 1877, Vivien emigrated to France and began publishing Symbolist poetry under the influence of the Belle Époque, Sappho and laudanum, in addition to having openly lesbian relationships with the likes of Natalie Barney, an American heiress, and Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, one of the Paris Rothschilds.

It’s such an interesting period for Marçal to explore and by moving between fin de siècle Paris and contemporary times she’s able to display the full power of her writing. It’s by no means an easy book and it took her 10 years to write, but it’s a phenomenal piece of literature that has also made its mark on the Queer canon.”

It's often the case that having fallen in love with the work of pioneering authors and poets, we carry that torch to those who might be considered their natural successors. I asked Tiago who he had chosen to celebrate next. Dolors Miquel seemed to be an apposite illustration of this literary pattern:

“If we talk about there being a natural heir to Marçal, it is undoubtedly the poet Dolors Miquel, despite being so different stylistically. Miquel is also from Lleida, and this shows up much more visibly in her poetry as she often writes in the Lleida dialect, something that Marçal didn’t do as much, but despite the stylistic differences, Miquel is a radical feminist poet very much in the Marçal mould.

Take for example the line from her 2002 book Mos de gat: ‘Soul sickness hangs around the neck of so many women and they call it a pearl necklace!’ or from her 2017 book El guant de plàstic rosa: ‘I was I am I will be a woman / Never will I speak the simplistic language of male poets.’

My first meaningful encounter with Dolors Miquel was at a live reading at my local bookshop. I knew bits and bobs about her, I knew she was held in high regard, that she was from Lleida, so I went along to see her. It was one of those literary watershed moments for me when I saw her read: she had such personality and rhythm, it was a complete performance.

She was accompanied by a band that gave her words so much resonance and it left me bursting with energy watching how she sought out the music, adapting her timing and words and tone to it. I was blown away and immediately went to find everything I could by her in my local library. As I read through her work there was a clear evolution as an artist, but there’s always the same combative feminism, the same humour, emotion, sensuality and sexuality.

It was interesting to read how much of an influence Enric Casasses has been on her as an artist and how his approach has not only influenced her poetry, but also her performances. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that her poem ‘Mare nostrum’, which is a radical feminist, anti-clerical reworking of the Lord’s Prayer, provoked the posturing ire of the right-wing Spanish political party, PP, and the Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers. Both tried to get her up before a judge on ‘crimes against religious sentiment’”.

Tiago’s passion for Miquel is irresistibly contagious, and catalysed my intense desire to understand the literary influences acting upon her, the relationship her own work has with past pioneers, and the voices of other modern creatives chiming with her own artistic sensibilities.

“Like Marçal, Miquel’s influences also include J.V. Foix, the futurist poet Joan Salvat-Papasseit, Ausiès March and the whole medieval tradition, but she also draws heavily on Spanish Golden Age poets, Anna Akhmatova, Charles Baudelaire, Björk, P.J. Harvey and Dylan Thomas. This is what I love most about reading her work: not only is her poetry fantastic but reading it always launches you into (re)discovering other writers. In terms of her later work, I’d say that Mercè Rodoreda’s darkest works, that is, Quanta, quanta Guerra (1980) and La mort i la primavera (1986), are clear influences on her exploration of death decay and love amid human brutality.”

.Again, I asked Tiago to select a work from Miquel’s oeuvre that garners his greatest respect, and perhaps serves as the apogee of her creative output to date:

“I think her best work is El guant de plàstic rosa, which is soon to come out as The Pink Plastic Glove in Peter Bush’s translation. Here she moves away from previous poetic forms to write what can only be described as prose poems. It’s a powerful, visceral work, but since her publication Ictiosaure (2019), Miquel has drawn a line under writing poetry and is now focussing on theatre. I personally can’t wait to see what she comes up with because I have no doubt it will be spectacular.”

In the next instalment of our series, Tiago will tell me about two more shining lights shimmering within Catalan literature’s scintillating corpus. We will explore these writers, their work and why they deserve our attention as readers. Join us aboard our ‘frigate’, for we have more treasures to visit!