Miquel Martí i Pol

The biography of Miquel Martí i Pol (Roda de Ter, 1929 - Vic, 2003) has been marked by a number of defining features, amongst which the following are the most outstanding: a) his bond with his home town, where he has always lived; b) his condition as a worker and clerk at the La Blava textile factory in Roda de Ter where he was employed from the age of fourteen until he was forty-three; c) the consequences of the multiple sclerosis he contracted in about 1970, which has impeded normal movement and speech; d) his commitment to his social class and country; e) his willingness, since he was young, to question himself, to make an effort to know himself and the world around him. And, naturally, there is his work as a poet, which began to bear fruit in about 1948. Since then, Miquel Martí i Pol's best biographical reference has been his work. He has not only written poetry. Even though he considers that he still has to try his hand at prose writing, he has published a volume of short stories Contes de la vila de R... i altres narracions (Stories from the Town of R? and Other Fiction - 1978), two volumes of memoirs and another of journalistic articles and a number of translations. He has written for several reviews, notable among which are Inquietud (1955-1966) and Reduccions (after 1977), of which he was a member of the editorial board.

From Existentialism to Historical Realism

With an education dominated by the prevailing Catholicism of the years that followed the Civil War, in a milieu perfectly described in El poble (The Town - 1966), the young Martí i Pol presents himself as questioning his being and destiny. He asserts his "I" as distinct from "you" (plural), which includes all other human beings but also focuses on the people around him, most of them workers, whose condition he admires, while also evincing his confusion ` which in poems like El fugitiu (The Fugitive) becomes distress -caused by his gradual process of getting to know (or his discovery of) his own personality. A crisis of religious values that occurred some time between 1952 and 1957 ended up by accentuating the intimate isolation in which the poet dwelled until the crisis was finally resolved through his opening up -let us say socially- to the reality of his surroundings. This was initially focussed within two immediate frameworks, his town and the factory where he worked, from whence were born the poems of El poble and the two collections La fàbrica (The Factory - 1959) and another work of the same title La fàbrica (1972).

With the poems of El poble and La fàbrica, Martí i Pol fully embraces the movement known as historical realism inasmuch as he translates into this framework a world -that of the people among whom he lives- which he knows very well as an insider, describing it by means of such realist procedures as the inventory or the chronicle. The workers who go to work every day, in the factory or climbing scaffolding, women who do the housework and retired people are his main characters in these poems, his "heroes" in that he elevates them to this status because he considers their work and their lives are, in fact, nothing less than an almost epic deed. The contrast between his descriptions of the life of a worker, which runs its course in very harsh conditions, and the human treatment, of great tenderness with which he refers to specific people, sometimes with their full names -"his people"- is one of the most original features of his poetry. In brief, Martí i Pol is committed to the people of his town and factory and, by extension, to the social class to which they belong, going so far as to put his voice and gesture -discourse and action- in their service. "I want to speak of them, in speaking of people today. / I want to speak of them. Without them, I do not exist." Evidently, poetry like this is expressed in direct and accessible language but, far from falling into the trap of pamphleteering, Martí i Pol manages to sustain the poetic value of his texts through painstaking choice of words and recurring simple metaphors and images that evoke situations and states of mind that permit the reader to feel familiar with the social context and to enter the personal worlds of the men and women that move within it. Continue reading...