Baltasar Porcel

Baltasar Porcel (Andratx, 1938 - Barcelona, 2009) is one of the Catalan writers that has received the most international acclaim and is an irreplaceable figure of contemporary Catalan literature. Translated into many languages, his works have been awarded prizes in Italy (The Bocaccio Prize), France (The Meditérranée prize) and the United States (Critics' Choice). His creative output includes drama, non-fiction and journalism. For many years he has contributed a daily article to the newspaper La Vanguardia, which has become one of the most widely-read columns in the country.

While it is becoming more and more difficult for me to express what I might call my poetics, responsible critics are defining it with ever-greater success. In this regard I am referring especially to the authors of the recent prologue-studies of my Obres completes (Complete Works), beginning with Joaquim Molas, who has written the first and most extensive of these. But I find with every day that passes that things are increasingly difficult in their theoretical aspect, precisely because I find their practice increasingly more concrete. When, of course, I can give them the form that I am searching for, something that is not always easy and often is impossible.

I have never been interested in experimental authors or in members of the avant-garde. Or they have interested me very little, except when they have made use of form to achieve an astonishing effect. Like Kafka. Or Faulkner. But very often this literary procedure goes no further than an ingeniousness and exhibitionism that seeks to find expression by means of distortion. And it fails to find it, except for those who live in that domain and consider the world not through what it is but through what they appreciate in it.

Nor do I believe in authors who take refuge in conceptualism, in a theoretical scaffolding, as a primordial defence of their work. They tend to fare very well with certain lecturers, when what justifies one is strength and harmony, only. An author may develop an explanation of what he feels when creating, as some have done on occasion, beginning with Conrad. But however much the inner void of a book of poems may be adorned with uplifting pseudo-philosophy, it will continue to be a fraud. There is a sort of essay à la française that confounds verbal incontinence with content. I much prefer reflection of the Anglo-Saxon kind, bound as it is to concrete realities.

Concerning myself, I have to say that I suspect that I write from an ecological and pantheistic awareness. In other words, I see man, the landscape, death, the effects of light, as an interconnected whole. It has been said of me, and I have said, that at times I am rather baroque. But I was writing in the same way when it was said of me, and I said, that I was actually a realist: there are human passions and the colours and forms of nature in my writing. Sometimes, looking at the night-sky, I feel the spherical nature of the Earth, the way that it spins through the frightful void of the Universe. A wide valley in repose beneath the onslaught of the wind stirs me much more deeply than any human contact. People and animals - Carme Arnau has written about this and Cavalls cap a la fosca (Horses into the night) - sometimes strike me as unquestionably alike: they are like us as children? and death is matter in transformation, a drama like that of the fish caught on the hook. Happiness resembles a tree in flower, almond-blossom under the February sun?

Style, the word, must respond to this deep conviction: writers are words. But there are writers of living words - Maragall, the poet, had a theory about this that I know nothing of - and others of the empty, though inflated, word. Life in language flows from the semantics on which the author has sucked, from the obscure relationship between touch and the sensation of things, emotion, and the defining words through which the writer, the man, has known them. The lack of all this is the great shortcoming of wonderful stylists and great verbal creators such as Azorín and Valle Inclán. In contrast, it is the superb virtue of Josep Pla, when he does not convert it into a knitting-machine. And this is one of the struggles in the midst of which I always find myself. When I read a text of my own and it does not rise up as if it were a scale model, I erase it. Continue reading...