Margarit

I arrived in Madrid when José María Aznar boasted about speaking Catalan in private. One day I asked him aside and point-blank what was the last book in Catalan he had read. I expected to leave him flustered, to be honest. The truth is that he flustered me by answering like a shot and without batting an eyelid:

- Joana, by Joan Margarit.

The collection of poems that Joan Margarit dedicated to the slow-motion loss of his daughter, who suffered from a serious illness for thirty years… I hadn't read it. I looked for it. Did I like it? I would be lying if I said that Margarit is my favorite poet in Catalan. I must also say that I have little favorite poetry in Catalan beyond Ausiàs March, Verdaguer and, if you push me, Josep Carner. Martí i Pol comforts me but I get tired quickly, which is the same thing that happens to me, let's say, with Espriu and Papasseit. It's as if Catalan poetry had too much restraint and lacked… daring?

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Margarit is not a kamikaze poet but he is undoubtedly a daring poet. Someone who dares to show his wounds and losses without fuss and without disguise. Someone who dares to go out into the open field of a language ---and even two--- to which it is difficult to put more obstacles in the way. To throw more friendly fire on them.

You need to carry a lot of light inside to tell, as Margarit tells it, his beautiful story of bilingualism in real life… and in poetry. Judge for yourselves his statements in a recent interview in El País:

But we were talking earlier about that tension between your two languages.

Ah, yes. The leader arrives and imposes Castilian on me. I don't know how else to describe it. They crush us for that, and my parents, worried. My father did not belong to the side of the victors. He had fought with the Republicans, went to France and was in the Argelès camp. He returned and they put him in El Dueso prison, in Santoña. They didn't want trouble. They lived terrified. It was normal in that situation. We spoke Catalan at home, but I couldn't learn it correctly outside. There comes a time when we went to live in Tenerife. Year 1954. I arrive there, the closest thing to paradise. A world in which I spend the first years soaking up the sea, forests and climbing Teide on horseback. Have you ever climbed a volcano over 3,700 meters on horseback?

No, sir. 

And in high school, boys and girls mixed. That is, this world.

Right.

Aesthetics, light, nobody talked about the war… It only brushed them. First loves… That's where I thoroughly learn Castilian. And I start writing poems. In what language? In the one where I don't make spelling mistakes, because the other language hadn't been taught to me. I keep writing… 20 years and several books pass. And, damn it, it's not what I was looking for. Good and bad reviews come out. But I'm not happy. Until I become friends with Miquel Martí i Pol and he tells me: "My daughter, to whom I passed a letter of yours, forgive me, has asked me why you don't write your poems in Catalan." "What if this is it?" I ask myself. Because there is no bibliography to explain it to you. It doesn't happen in prose, but I don't know of any book that properly analyzes the influence of the mother tongue in poetry. Rilke, who wrote in German, had written poems in French, but they are worthless.

And that's when you start mixing both languages?

I have no other choice. I always start in Catalan. If it doesn't happen that way, it doesn't come out. I realize this and write 10 books in Catalan.

Did you experience that revelation as a kind of orgiastic euphoria…?

Of course! But, of course, I start winning awards in Catalan and I'm in a hurry. At 38, an orgy arrives that sins by excess of enthusiasm. And of those many in Castilian and another 10 in Catalan, nothing is worth anything anymore. I start to consider my work from 'Restos de aquel naufragio' (Remains of that shipwreck). I spend 20 years writing without knowing what the hell I want to write and that is the first book that I consider worthy of my complete work. I'm almost 40 years old. Martí i Pol tells me to continue in Catalan, of course. But what do I do with that other language that had given me everything before, the one that had helped me fight and I couldn't abandon? Such great sadness came over me! Well, I mix them. Both. I fulfill both. That's it. In short, I have become a strange poet whom both sides look at with suspicion.

Surely poetry is that very thing: poetry is being like that. That's why it's a source of pride that being like that can deserve the highest award in Spanish letters, the Cervantes Prize, and that a king and a queen take the trouble to pay homage to a poet, and not the other way around. On Barcino beach, by the sea…