Jaume Pont

As Professor of Modern and Contemporary Spanish Literature at the University of Lleida, Jaume Pont (Lleida, 1947) has focused his research in two areas: twentieth-century poetry, especially postism and Carlos Edmundo de Ory, and Antonio Ros de Olano and nineteenth-century fantastic narrative. His work as a literary critic has also been a constant, his pieces appearing in a range of reviews and newspapers, for example Destino, Ínsula, La Vanguardia, Avui, among others. With Joaquim Marco, he was joint author of La nova poesia catalana. Estudi i antologia [New Catalan Poetry. A Study and Anthology] (1980), a book that detects the aesthetic shifts in Catalan poetry of the 1970s while, from El año literario español 1978 [The Spanish Literary Year 1978] through to Letras españolas 1976-1986 [Spanish Letters 1976`1986], his annual accounts of Catalan literature accomplished a comprehensive synthesis of its evolution.

If Jaume Pont's academic and critical task has been one of connecting and establishing different references of modernity, his own poetry is one of its finest examples. (The term "modernity" would embrace the whole set of relations by means of which attempts have been made over the last two centuries to associate the world, poetic language and the poet, from the most magical and unifying to the chariest among them.) Coming behind Joan Brossa and J. V. Foix, and in the shelter of French symbolism, Límit(s) (1976), Pont's first book, seeks power and suggestiveness in precision while his verses are enhanced by their freedom of semantic association that excludes neither antithesis nor crypticism. This break with historical realism leads Pont, like many other poets of his generation, to probe the possibilities of language on his voyage to the realms of the unknown.

The title of his second book, Els vels de l'eclipsi [The Veils of the Eclipse] (1980), summarises this desire to inquire into things: "man seeks in the universe key and distance". The collection, however, adds a more physical and sensual acceptance of the world, with images and a lexical tone that combine, for example, light and touch. Francesc Parcerisas highlights in his discussion of this work the role of love and of the sign before the fleetingness of time. The confrontation between Eros and Thanatos, the impossible victory of the instant against the inexorable passing of life will continue in Jardí bàrbar [Barbarous Garden] (1981) which, on the one hand, culminates Pont's first creative period and, on the other, offers glimpses of the innovations in what was to come: the elegiac tone of narration that would increase in Divan and Llibre de la frontera [The Frontier Book], the link by way of flesh (sex and offal) that binds love and death in Raó d'atzar [The Rightness of Chance], et cetera.

For Àlex Broch, the dualities that structure Jardí bàrbar are Diurnal/Nocturnal and Love/Destruction. "Light as a space of lucidity and existential plenitude. Shadow as a space of night-time, questing and mystery. Fire as a space of love and human plenitude. Ash as destruction and consummation of the space of love." It is not very difficult to observe the weight of the collective imaginary, the value that poetic creation has given, from the pre-Socratics onwards, to fire, earth, water and wind. However, it also seems to me that this collection lives in struggle and of struggle: the battlefield, in the words of poem XX in Part One, is "the indomitable landscape of life", where the clash between the impossibility of mastering reality, on the one hand, and the power of the poetic sign, the strength of love, on the other, is acted out. In other words: Still a name. / Raw flesh of silence, / rust where death colours eyelids. /For love, the long apprenticeship of centuries. Continue reading...