"He had a difficult childhood. His father, who was a stoker on the Montevideo, a ship of the Compañía Trasatlántica Española, died when he was seven years old. His mother, who subsisted on small jobs, sent him to the naval asylum school. A frigate, the Tornado, where the internal children learned just enough: to read and write, and things related to sea life as it trained future sailors". Ferran Aisa is, possibly, the reference expert on the figure of Joan Salvat-Papasseit. Author, together with Mei Vidal, of the biographies L'home entusiasta (Virus) and the exhaustive Joan Salvat-Papasseit 1894-1924 (Base), he has rescued the poet's work, documentation, and correspondence through various books, exhibitions, and conferences, in addition to having been curator of the Any Papasseit in 2024 and a fervent defender of returning to Virrei Amat square its original name with which it was inaugurated in 1933: Joan Salvat-Papasseit square.
"At 12 years old he left the asylum and started working whatever he could ---he continues---: errand boy in a grocery store, apprentice sculptor, night watchman on the docks… But he was very restless and a voracious reader". The poet's intellectual forging was completely self-taught. "He already visited all the bookstores in Santa Madrona with his friends and participated in literary gatherings. Later, he trained at the Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular". In this association founded in 1903, which brings knowledge and critical thinking closer to the most disadvantaged classes, Salvat immersed himself in poetry, narrative, and philosophy, and discovered his great influences, such as Ibsen or Nietzsche.
"He was a working-class hero, a guy who, coming from very humble beginnings, always aspired to be a vanguardist, that is, to be among the first in everything. And to be so based on a work ethic, without anyone giving him anything". Àlex Pons is a researcher, collector, bookseller, and co-author, together with Àlex Darriba, of Joan Salvat-Papasseit, llibreter, editor, poeta. The book offers a dazzling journey through the figure of the poet, emphasizing his bibliophilia ---which would lead him to work as a bookseller in the Galeries Laietanes, under the guidance of Eugeni d'Ors--- and his role as a cultural generational unifier at a time of radical modernization that redefines both ideas and creative processes in terms of technical reproducibility.
In the context of a country halfway between high illiteracy, social struggle, and a restless intellectual class laying the foundations for progress, Salvat is in a hurry to learn, to live, as if deep down he knew he was destined to shine brightly for a very short time. In El fet del dia d'ahir i d'avui, Joan Alavedra describes him thus: "Tenia una febre de lectures, una fúria de fer coses, un veritable deliri per actuar".
Breathing and glossing the factory smoke
The Tragic Week of 1909 inaugurates Salvat-Papasseit's ideological journey. In his childhood, he had been a fervent Catholic, but his insatiable intellectual appetite, and his friendship with figures like Emili Eroles or Alavedra, brought him closer to revolutionary positions that finally solidified through his readings and learning at the Ateneu.He begins his stage of political militancy through talks, gatherings, and a vehement anti-bullfighting activism. He becomes librarian of the Ateneu and the readings multiply. Among these, he discovers the work of Máximo Gorki, with whom he connects immediately since he also came from a very poor family and had been orphaned at a very young age. The first writings do not take long to arrive. "These are proletarian articles in magazines such as Los Miserables, or La Justicia Social, which in homage to Gorki he signs with the pseudonym Gorkiano and which, besides being revolutionary, also have a great philosophical content," explains Ferran Aisa.
Through this journalistic production, which would end up being collected in the book Factory Smoke, published in 1919, we witness the rapid mutations of Salvat-Papasseit. In his articles we see him advocate for internationalist socialism, for libertarian anarchism, for Bakunin, for Gorki (of course) and, later, for a nationalist drift strongly influenced by his friend Daniel Cardona. "He is Nietzschean and, as such, realizes that love and war are the movements of union and disintegration that make the world evolve," nuances Àlex Pons.
From political militancy to artistic militancy
"Starting to work at Galeries Laietanes is, for Salvat, like a second university that adds to the Ateneu Enciclopèdic," Aisa reasons. Thus was born the bookseller, attentive to the avant-garde magazines arriving from Italy, France or the United Kingdom, intellectually insatiable, who treated the cream of Barcelona's thought as equals, and who did not forget his proletarian roots. "He was the first face people encountered when entering that immense space, where art, antiques and exhibitions converged," adds Pons, who quotes Josep Pla from Homenots, recalling how Salvat impressed the audience with a dithyrambic revolutionary speech, not always to the bourgeois taste of that audience noucentista.This work, in contact with the intelligentsia, can help as a key to understanding how Salvat redirects his voracious enthusiasm, moving from political to artistic militancy. From social avant-garde movements to the forms of art avant-garde. An ethical-aesthetic journey for which one cannot fail to point out his friendship with Joaquim Torres-Garcia and Rafael Barradas, Uruguayan artists based in Barcelona who founded vibrationism, the Catalan version of futurism with which the Italian Marinetti and the Frenchman Apollinaire shook the ideas of that convulsive Europe.
In 1917 he launched the magazine Un Enemic del Poble, subtitled "fulla de subversió espiritual" (sheet of spiritual subversion), where he published his aphorisms and, at the end of that year, published his first poem: Columna vertebral: sageta de foc (Spine: arrow of fire). A calligram of marked futurist character where the author plays with words and typographies to extol, in the form of a manifesto, a dynamic youth, projected towards an unstoppable upward movement. Pure futurism.
Poetavanguardistacatalà
Guided by his hunger for stimuli, for championing the artistic transformation of the environment, from 1917 Joan Salvat-Papasseit dedicates himself body and soul to his poetic activism. He collaborates in newspapers and magazines such as La Columna de Foc or La Publicitat and, in addition to Un Enemic del Poble, he publishes the only issue of Arc-Voltaic, with a cover by Miró and collaborators such as Joaquim Torres-Garcia, who leaves his Manifest Art-Evolució. Write avant-garde poems like 54045, Linoleum or The record of a Bach fugue, which will end up collected in his first poetry book, Poems on Hertzian Waves, followed by other poetry collections such as The port irradiator and the seagulls, The poem of La rosa als llavis (one of the great erotic poetry collections in Catalan literature) or The conspiracies, where he gives free rein to his independence ideas.He publishes his manifesto Contra els poetes en minúscula: primer manifest futurista català, which he signs as Poetavanguardistacatalà, where he exhorts poets "to be future, that is, immortal […] Poets in capital letters… haughty, brave, heroic and above all sincere". He rubs shoulders with other avant-gardists such as Guillermo de Torre or Marinetti himself, and his poetry receives praise in magazines such as the Italian Valori Plastici, the Dutch De Stijl, or the French Revue de l'Époque. In Barcelona, he brings together, stirs up, and polemicizes. His friendship with JV Foix is cut short, mutating from mutual admiration and affection to an animosity about which, already in the 1940s, the poet from Sarrià would retract, vindicating the capital importance of Salvat's avant-garde figure.
In 1920, he travels to Paris commissioned by Galeries Laietanes. "An important trip for someone like him, who came from a lower class, and who has the opportunity to go to that city to buy avant-garde books," explains Aisa. "From that trip, I love the poem Reflex número 2, which he writes looking at a woman on the subway, enjoying that moment, capturing its sounds, the image of that femme aux oranges, delving into the realm of synesthesia that we know since Rimbaud," adds Pons. There, in the epicenter of the Cité Lumière, Salvat is happy.
Soul on fire
Married to Carme Eleuterio, who will also start working at Laietanes, Salvat has his first daughter, Salomé, in 1919, the same year he contracts tuberculosis, which marks his countdown. From then on, his health problems will be chronic and constant. In his last years of life, the poet seems perfectly aware of the flames consuming him. If he was in a hurry before, now even more so. If he ran before, now he flies. "I have never had luck nor will I ever have it but the joy is mine, because I know how to feel it, profession of Poet that I am. According to the prediction, death will take me with fire, because an inner fire consumes me", he writes.He insists on his independentist stance, "although he doesn't lack the courage to say that the Catalan people are cowardly," Pons reasons. And he writes, a lot, as much as possible, in Catalan and Castilian, in avant-garde and classical forms, trying to live all the lives that can fit into the little time he has left. But on August 7, 1924, tuberculosis wins the last round. He is 30 years old; a few months earlier, his second daughter, Núria, had died at only two years old. Under his pillow, he keeps some poems that will be published posthumously in the volume Óssa Menor, subtitled "fi dels poemes d'avantguarda" (end of the avant-garde poems). The closing of a cycle that, however, does not inaugurate the next one. It only inaugurates the unknown of what would have happened if.
The flames have died down and there is only ash left. The great Catalan avant-garde poet of the 20th Century has died, the hero with hands stained with ink and a pen dipped in his heart.
The Bard of Barcelona
"Holderlin says that what endures is founded by poets, and I interpret that phrase as the homeland being founded by poets. Because what would the United Kingdom be without Shakespeare? What would Germany be without Rilke? What would Spain be without Cervantes? In Catalonia, however, we lack that poet. At least, the poet of the 20th Century. The one from the 19th is Verdaguer, no doubt. But what about the one from the last century? Some say Carles Riba and Josep Carner, for their poetic precision, their verb and their neologisms, and because their poems appeared just when normative Catalan was being forged; others say Martí i Pol. I say it's Joan Salvat-Papasseit," claims Àlex Pons.The author of Joan Salvat-Papasseit, llibreter, editor, poeta laments that, nowadays, he is so little remembered, almost unknown. "What we cannot be is a nation, if there is no mythology of one of our great poets. If we know the entire Barça lineup, but we don't remember the one who was most sung by the Nova Cançó generation."
Ferran Aisa also attributes great importance to Catalan singer-songwriter music of the 60s in rescuing Salvat's figure. "My first contact with his work was an anthology of Catalan poetry that someone left forgotten in the Aurora, the bar my family had in the Barrio Chino. I was 15, I read it and I liked his poems. And it stayed there, somewhere in my head, until in a performance by the Setze Jutges, in the 60s, Ovidi Montllor came out to sing Nocturn per acordió and that reactivated my interest in the poet. Of course, the Nova Cançó did a lot to keep his memory alive, along with other figures like Jaume Fuster or his own wife, Carme, who continued to remember and honor him until her death."
Despite the existence of a Passeig Joan Salvat-Papasseit in that Barceloneta that the bard lived and praised, the recovery of the original name of Plaça Virrei Amat is more than a tribute or an act of historical reparation (the name change took place after the victory of the rebel faction in 1939). It is a way of rescuing from collective oblivion a name so fundamental to understanding the last century from a Catalan and working-class perspective.
The hero who, starting from nothing, completely self-taught, and in little more than ten years, bequeathed the words, ideas, and verses that best define our character in that trembling, tragic, and fascinating century, where the most refulgent lights and the darkest shadows of the human condition coexisted, danced, copulated.