Josep Maria de Sagarra

The work of Sagarra is the result of his being a complete writer, one of the clearest examples in Catalan literature. He creates verse of extraordinary quality both in poetic works an in plays, and cultivates almost all the spheres of prose. He wrote novels; he was one of the great exponents of jounalistic articles; and he was also a major memoir-writer, and a chronicler of his age.

The childhood and adolescence of Josep Maria de Sagarra (Barcelona, 1894-1961) were spent in a house where "the ambience of remote existences remained present in smells, objects and even in customs". An "eighteenth-century mentality" permeated family life in the family mansion of carrer de Mercaders, the Barcelona residence for three hundred years of this lineage of country gentry. The future writer, who was born in 1894, began delving into the library at a tender age, almost as early as he was initiated into frequenting the miscellany of relics of the family history. Readings of the "Segle d'Or" (Golden Age) writers and the Spanish romantics, along with Verdaguer and Pitarra were the first sources of inspiration and imitation for a boy who went to a Jesuit secondary school thinking that there was no secret to writing verses. At school, however, he acquired a better grasp of metrics and studied rhetoric, and would discover Dante, Ariosto and Costa i Llobera: "pleasure in the classics and pleasure in great pomp and circumstance" marked his literary beginnings.

His circle of friends from the Law Faculty (Carles Riba, Lluís Valeri, Eudald Duran Reynals...), the habit he soon cultivated of competing in the Jocs Florals literary competitions, his acquaintance with such widely differing personalities as Guimerà and Carner, frequenting the premises of the Institute of Catalan Studies and of the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya, becoming a member of the Barcelona Ateneu (Athenaeum) whose other members were quite a lot older than he was, all contributed towards the social life that would cushion the role of poet that Sagarra had acquired by mid-1914 with his Primer llibre de poemes (First Book of Poems). Consisting of a selection of his written works, this volume offers glimpses, behind the expressive opulence of his writing and a tendency to channel the lyrical experience into poetic narration (which would become distinctive characteristics of his poetry), of his adolescent discovery of Nature and a balanced interplay of sensuality and melancholy: the classicised pomp had disappeared in favour of personal experience as his poetic raw material. The book is a springboard for a dazzling and productive career that, in the space of only a few years, would diversify into his working with all genres and that would not be interrupted until the Civil War. For the moment, however, what the twenty-year-old Sagarra envisages is becoming a diplomat, which he feels could combine well with writing. When he eventually decides that his professional life will not be spent in consulates but in the proverbial field of journalism, it is already 1918. He does not know at this point that he is soon to be caught up in yet another activity in which he will make his premiere that same year -as a playwright. His theatre career began at the Romea with Rondalla d'esparvers (The Kestrel Story).

Thenceforth, and until the outbreak of the Civil War, he would produce collections of poems and plays, always with the background of his constant flow of journalistic pieces as well as a -lesser- production in prose fiction. His extraordinary mastery of language and innate gifts only partly explain his graphomaniac prodigality and his idyllic relation with his public, especially theatregoers. Continue reading...