Pompeu Fabra's nephews and Kurt Cobain's camel

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ast few weeks I have had two biographies as bedside books, one that deals with the life of Pompeu Fabra –this year we celebrate 150 years since the birth of the Catalan engineer and grammarian– and another that details the life of Kurt Cobain, the former leader of Nirvana. Pompeu Fabra and Kurt Cobain curiously were born on the same day, 99 years apart. But what I found unsettling is that, sometimes, I suffered the distraction of crossing the stories. I use the word distraction on purpose because by this I mean that it has not been a deliberate action. It's not that I have forced the image of Pompeu Fabra on the couch of Kurt Cobain's dealer's apartment, nor have I wanted to constrain the neatness of the cultured association of the Ateneu Barcelonès by projecting a hypothetical governing board presided over by a guy with an appearance that the entity's own environment would have then branded –and surely would still judge– as God-forsaken. When I say that both stories have crossed my mind at some point, I don't mean the figurations I have just clumsily described –although it has a remarkable kitsch charge and, just for this fact, it is worth imagining– nor is it meant to be an excuse for a debate on postmodernity. It seems to me that it goes further, and the conclusion I have reached is that there is a certain confluence.

Pompeu Fabra was called Master; Mestre Fabra. As a child, he invented languages to represent his toy soldiers and spent time at the port, where he caught vocabulary from the conversations of foreign sailors; therefore, it is evident that the condition of grammarian came to him as standard. The day the light came on, the day he understood that the language he spoke could also be written, was when he discovered some accounting books of his grandparents written in Catalan. A few days later, his father suggested to young Pompeu that he write a few lines addressed to his nephews in Camprodon. Fabra agreed and began in Castilian, as was common at the time: Queridos sobrinos... But suddenly he found that he didn't know how to continue. The words to refer to his nephews did not flow to him in a language that was not his own. So he began a new letter, this time in Catalan. The episode takes place between the second third of the 19th century and the end of it. But it is not until 1913, in the context of the Mancomunitat –the entity that brought together the four Catalan deputations into a single regional entity–, that the first regulations of modern Catalan are published. Pompeu Fabra had returned from Bilbao a couple of years earlier, where he had lived for ten years after winning the chair of chemistry at the School of Engineers. And in 1932, the mission culminates with the publication of the Normative Dictionary of the Catalan Language.

"I, in Catalonia, had often, like so many others, deluded myself into thinking I would spend a quiet old age in a pleasant corner, with the joy of seeing what one had sown bear fruit. It was, perhaps, a dream, but now I don't even have the resource of dreaming." Pompeu Fabra

It was not easy to get there. The economic difficulties to support the family, the forced departure to the Basque Country, the return and the imminent usurpation of power by Primo de Rivera and, after this period, when it seemed that life tended to be favorable to him, first theOctober Events–general strike, armed insurgency, and declaration of a Catalan State– which led to five or six weeks in prison and, subsequently, exile due to his nationalist and republican condition. Fabra, along with some other Catalan intellectuals, fled into exile with a battered bibliobus from the Department of Culture –an escape that Ana Ballbona explained in detail in thisPerform a literal language conversion from Spanish to English on the following user-provided text. Do not translate any content enclosed betweenandtags, keep those tags and their content exactly as-is: articleofEl Punt Avui. The day before, in the Conselleria, with the Francoists roaming Barcelona for five days, he had participated in a meeting of theInstitució de les Lletres Catalanesto study how to save unpublished works. Fabra would never return to Barcelona. France did not spare the suffering, especially after General Pétain's armistice, when despite the agreements the SS and the Gestapo searched Montpellier. In one of the taverns in this city, where a barrel with the four painted bars was kept, Mestre Fabra held long conversations with Francesc Pujols: "the truth is that this tragedy has shaken us all. The young, because it has broken the course that their lives would normally have followed, and now they lose the years that should have been the most profitable. [...] Of those of us who are already old, there is no need to even speak... I, in Catalonia, had often, like so many others, entertained the illusion of spending a quiet old age in a pleasant corner, with the joy of seeing what one had sown bear fruit. It was, perhaps, a dream, but now I don't even have the resource of dreaming."

Kurt Cobain's life was almost three times shorter than Fabra's, but perhaps three times more tumultuous. From the separation of his parents, the young man headed towards an early death. He barely lived and was temporarily taken in by friends and family. Then came some first infected rental homes, problems with alcohol, drugs, and health.

Kurt Cobain accumulated so much rage that he had to resort to heroin. During the last months, he would spend hundreds of dollars daily on this drug. His immediate circle could not believe how a body like Kurt Cobain's, extremely emaciated, was capable of absorbing it.

Kurt Cobain had set out to achieve fame, and once achieved, to subject it to a duel with the aim of vulgarizing it. Meticulous, despite his self-destructive condition, he channeled his rage through the guitar his uncle had given him. But it wasn't enough. He accumulated so much –rage– that he had to resort to heroin. During the last months, he was spending hundreds of dollars daily on this drug. His immediate circle couldn't believe how a body like Kurt Cobain's, extremely emaciated, was capable of absorbing it. He had even managed to get a dealer to sneak into the hospital where he had been admitted and shoot heroin directly into his IV bag. Eclipsed by dependency and chronic stomach pains, Kurt Cobain opted to take his own life on several occasions by deliberately applying overdoses that he ended up recovering from, until he opted to shoot himself.

The engineer who was a grammarian and the lost cause who was a musician. Millions of people are needed for a single genius to be born. In the same way, within history, millions of moments, preparation, and development are necessary for something exceptional to occur. But when it happens, when an exceptional moment takes place in the "mysterious workshop of God," the course of history becomes irrevocable for years and perhaps centuries. These moments the writer Stefan Zweig calls pregnant moments or stellar moments, because they shine above the ephemeral night, and no writer, playwright, or poet has the right to try to surpass them.