Narcís Comadira

Narcís Comadira studied Humanities and Philosophy at the Seminary of his home city of Girona and at the Monastery of Montserrat, after which he began to study Architecture and Romance Philology, to end up with a degree in History of Art. From 1971 to 1973 he was a language tutor at the University of London. Apart from poetry and painting, he has also worked in other disciplines, for example as a playwright, translator, newspaper commentator, literary critic and author of studies in the fields of art, architecture and advertising. Some of his articles that have appeared in the “Quadern” – culture supplement of the newspaper El País – have been collected in the book Sense escut (With No Shield - 1998).

Girona, 1942. A multi-faceted artist (poet, playwright, translator, publicist and music lover), Narcís Comadira studied at the Girona Seminary, the Monastery of Montserrat and the Architecture and Arts faculties of the University of Barcelona.

He published his first poetic ventures (La febre freda (Cold Fever) and Papers privats (Private Papers)) in the 1960s. Then, with the title La llibertat i el terror. Poesia 1970-1980 (Freedom and Terror. Poetry 1970 ` 1980), which was published in 1981, he brought together the seven books he had written in the decade of the 1970s: Amich de plor...(Weeping's Friend ` 1970), El verd jardí (The Green Garden ` 1972), Les ciutats (Cities ` 1976), Un passeig pels bulevards ardents (A Walk Down Burning Boulevards ` 1974), Desdesig (Undesire ` 1976), Terra natal (Land of My Birth ` 1978), Àlbum de família (Family Album ` 1980), in which some of the constant themes of his poetry appear: the decadence of an ideal of the country (the Catalonia of the noucentista movement) transformed into a metaphor for human loss in general (almost all the poems of Terra natal and other texts devoted to Girona, for example); the self-portraits in which, playing with the name-myth "Narcís" (Narcissus), Comadira confronts his subject with social and family morals (especially in Àlbum de família, whose starting point is a set of family photos, but also in Amich de plor...); the passing of time (seasons and months, with "Meditació de novembre" (November Meditation) in El verd jardí) and nostalgia (especially in El verd jardí and the poem "Roma" (Rome) in Les ciutats); the complementary relationship between life and death (death feeding life, as in "Serra de cavalls" (Sierra of Horses) and "Iris blaus" (Blue Irises) in Terra natal); the role of art in individual and collective life; the relationship between death and art (the poem-poetics "Les ciutats") and the awesome terror of beauty in relation with love ("Desdesig") and art.

With Enigma (1985) ` his great symphony ` Comadira makes a qualitative leap in writing a book of powerful metaphysical tension. En quarantena (In Quarantine ` 1990) is a dense, bitter sonata that is structured into two parts, the first consisting of 26 often very short independent poems, and the second of the long poem "En quarantena", which gives overall sense to the book, condensing all the poet's doubts about his vital space (Catalonia, Girona), time, love, sex, flesh and physical beauty, words, God and poetry. In Usdefruit (Usufruct ` 1995), a series of impromptu poems of enigmatic density, syntactic freedom and a music that resembles the first part of En quarantena, he probes the memory of different moments shared by humankind.

Among his plays are Neva: un te (It's Snowing: A Cup of Tea ` 1992), La vida perdurable: un dinar (Perdurable Life: a Lunch ` 1992), L'hora dels adéus (1996), which have generally drawn on the world of Àlbum de família, along with a work devoted to Josep Pla, El dia dels morts. Un oratori per a Josep Pla (All Souls' Day. An Oratorio for Josep Pla ` 1997). His prose writings also signal his many intellectual interests: Girona. Matèria i memòria (Girona. Material and Memory ` 1992) and Girona. Retrat sentimental d'una ciutat (Girona. Sentimental Portrait of a City ` 1998), where he stresses the great importance of the theme of the city of his birth in his poetry; the cookery book Fórmules magistrals (Formulas of the Masters ` 1997); Sense escut (With No Shield ` 1998), a core collection of quite controversial and highly lucid articles; and Guia de l'arquitectura dels segles XIX i XX (A Guide to 19th and 20th Century Architecture ` 1978) and Rafael Masó, arquitecte noucentista (Rafael Masó, Architect of the "Noucentist" Movement ` 1996). Continue reading...