Joan Alcover

Palma, 1854-1926. Poet and essayist. He completed his secondary schooling at the Institute Balear where he was a pupil of Joan Lluís Pons i Gallarza and classmate of Costa i Llobera and Antoni Maura, after which he studied Law in Barcelona. After obtaining his degree in 1878, he returned to Palma where he worked as a lawyer. After 1886 he continued his career in the judiciary as a court reporter, as Court Secretary after 1894 and magistrate in the Provincial Court after 1911. At the same time, he had also embarked on a political career as a follower of Antoni Maura of whom he was a close personal friend: as municipal councillor (1879), provincial member for Manacor (1883) and member of the Spanish Parliament (1893). After a short stay in Madrid, he decided to return to Palma and abandon his political activities. Thenceforth, his support for Maura's policies was purely formal and began to wane as he drew closer to pro-Catalan politics and, in particular to the Lliga Regionalista.

A complex of personal and family circumstances had a notable influence in his literary career. In 1881 he had married Rosa Pujol i Guarch who was from Barcelona. They had three children, Pere, Teresa and Gaietà. His wife died in 1887. In 1891 he married a Mallorcan woman, Maria del Haro i Rosselló, with whom he had two more children, Maria and Pau. The latter is the only one who survived: in 1901 his daughter Teresa had died of tuberculosis; in 1905 his son Pere died of typhus; and, in 1919, on the same night his daughter Maria died in Mallorca and his son Gaietà died in Barcelona. Death has a considerable presence in his work wherein he channelled it into elegy, while giving a personal, existential sense to his creative activity. Prior to this, until the early years of the twentieth century, Alcover had been well on the way to becoming a prototypical provincial intellectual. After 1872 he had began to publish poems in Catalan and Spanish in Revista Balear, Museo Balear and El Isleño and had even been awarded an extraordinary prize in the Barcelona literary competition known as the Jocs Florals for his poem "La creu" (The Cross).

Writing poetry was a complement to his social functions as a prestigious and outstanding citizen, the centre of a discussion group of the island's best-known intellectuals who regularly met in his home. His initial support, in his student years, for the beginnings of the Catalan renaissance movement, the Renaixença continued, although it would become more nuanced as he progressively moved towards almost exclusively adopting Spanish as his poetic language. Hence he regularly published collections of his work: Poesías (Poems ` 1887), which included three poems in Catalan, a number that grew to seven in a considerably expanded second edition (1892); Nuevas poesías (New Poems ` 1892), with only one poem in Catalan; the translation of Carducci's Fantasia (Fantasy); Poemas y Armonías (Poems and Harmonies ` 1894), and Meteoros (Meteors ` 1901), the latter two works entirely in Spanish. His poetry was close to that of Campoamor or Núñez de Arce and, at the time, enjoyed some degree of success with the critics (Menéndez y Pelayo, Juan Valera, etc.), while more recently it has been subject to widely varying reappraisal by such critics as Llompart, Vidal Alcover and Antoni Comas, among others.

Between 1899 and 1903, his attitude towards the language changed and, after a period in which he defended bilingualism, he finally consciously and unequivocally adopted Catalan in an irreversible decision that he justifies in numerous writings (and especially in a speech given at the International Congress on the Catalan Language in 1906, La llengua catalana és entre nosaltres l'única expressió possible de l'escriptor artista (Among Ourselves, the Catalan Language is the Only Possible Expression for the Writer and Artist). Interpretation of the reasons for this change has given rise to much controversy. In general it is seen as related with the death of his daughter Teresa, which led him into adopting a poetics of sincerity, an instrument for expressing his mourning on which he would base his poems. There are, nonetheless, cultural factors involved and, in particular, the impact in Palma of a Modernist group around Miquel dels Sants Oliver, which promoted an intense cultural life of modernisation and integration in Catalan circles with a programme that would end up taking shape as what is known as the "Mallorca School". In this framework, Alcover found a space of his own for effective cultural action, giving social sense to his creative activity so that his poetry, while it became more personal, also acquired a human and collective charge. Continue reading...