Marta Pessarrodona

In different attempts to take in Marta Pessarrodona's poetic oeuvre as a whole, the response of one of the first readers of this poet from the Vallès region (and doubtless one of the most discerning she will ever have) is frequently invoked. In the Prologue to Setembre 30 [September 30], the book with which she made her official debut into Catalan literary circles, Gabriel Ferrater was of the view that the contents of this poetry were "judicious" and that they excelled in the craft of "sincerity, in an apposite and moderately modulated tone of voice". It would seem however, that one should also say the best description of Marta Pessarrodona's poetic style was also made by Ferrater, not directly but when he was trying to classify his own, celebrated "Poema inacabat" [Unfinished Poem]. Two of its lines read, "I shall be digressive and cursive, / anacoluthonic and allusive". If we now try to apply this standard to Pessarrodona's poems, it would be sufficient for one to understand why it is always possible to recognise her unmistakeable voice even when only reading four or five lines of her poems.

To start with, hers is a digressive and cursive voice: just as happens with the articles she regularly publishes in the newspaper Avui, in her poems, fluent and unpredictable life continually enters, leaves, and filters through the innumerable interpolated clauses of a discourse that seems to have grasped very well that reality should not be forced too much if one wants to surpass it. It is also allusive because the mundaneness of her anecdotes, on the one hand, and, on the other, the conviction that "a book is a synthesis / of a whole heap of books read", inevitably project her verses on to an intertextuality made up of cultural and artistic references. That it is also, at bottom, anacoluthonic is what, ultimately, we would consider to be its most distinctive and personal feature: the situations of Pessarrodona's poems never seem totally explicit, because the poem, as if it were a conversation between two people who know each other well, leaps from one idea to another in the certainty that none of its subtexts will be lost along the winding way.

The author of Vida privada [Private Life] and A favor meu, nostre [In My, Our Favour] has always understood poetry as a superlative form of civilisation, as the last word in refinement of human, social relations. Nothing could be more alien to her style than imagining it bemused in speculation over some formal aspect of nature, or forcing words to avoid their primordial sense. This, then, is a conception that makes of the poem a natural prolongation of a real, interrupted dialogue, as if the words could gauge by lyrical condensation the exact point of affection or disaffection the relationship presents, thus converting the reader into an invariable accomplice. There are so few of her poems that do not seek an ear to hear them! If she herself is not the imaginary mirror, then we shall find that there is always somebody who, absent, ends up apostrophised in photographic effigy, or in memoriam or, alternatively, there is a very present you that the words seek to cling to: "I shall probe to know with sureness / all the bits of me that are you, / and all that remains in you of me" ("Bonjour, tristesse").

Hers is a poetry that practises with total spontaneity something that Western poetry has found difficult for a long time, something that causes it great problems. Marta Pessarrodona's poems are always talking to somebody, they know who they are addressing and are situated before a "you", whom they immediately make an accomplice. This poetry swims against the tide at a time in which it might be said that a sense of privacy does not seem to consent to any sort of expression that is not intellectual perplexity, or the circumstantial pleasures of a body become pure and simple sensation. It is not that this kind of poetry lacks sensations and ideas but, when they do appear, they do so by way of those words that we could almost write with capital letters because they occur so frequently in such verses: Love, Fidelity, Pain, Frailty, Friendship, Nostalgia, Devotion, Happiness, Desire, Emotion, Sadness. Continue reading...