Rosa Leveroni

The poet and librarian Rosa Leveroni i Valls (Barcelona, 1910-1985) was born in Barcelona on 1 April 1910, "daughter of that still-happy Barcelona bourgeoisie", to put it in her own words. She studied at the Príncep d'Astúries (Prince of Asturias) College and with the "Dames Negres" (Black Ladies) in the Passeig de Gràcia, her subjects including music and languages. Again, she read any book that fell into her hands. However, the really decisive influence in her education came when she started at the Librarians' School in 1930, just after it had been re-established by the Barcelona Provincial Council, in the days when its director was Jordi Rubió i Balaguer. Here, apart from the subjects strictly pertaining to librarianship, she studied classical languages, history of civilisations, literature, history of the book, notions of palaeography under the guidance of a teaching staff that included such eminent names as Jordi Rubió himself, Marçal Olivar, Pere Bohigas, Joan Petit, Lluís Nicolau d'Olwer, Rafael Campanals, and Carles Riba, the latter teaching General Literature, and Ferran Soldevila, who taught History of Catalonia.

The exchange of concerns between teachers and students, the out-of-hours activities that were encouraged and, in particular, the atmosphere of friendship that frequently meant that intellectual admiration turned into amorous crushes, shaped Leveroni's personality and determined her literary vocation. Hence, thanks to the fidelity of her friendship for Carles Riba she was his link, during his exile, with the nuclei of republican resistance in Catalonia as well as depositary of his Elegies de Bierville [Bierville Elegies]. In turn, the historian Soldevila was to be her great love and one her intellectual interlocutors, perhaps the main one, until his death in 1971. When she completed her studies in 1933, she was awarded a scholarship for further training in Madrid and to write a thesis on children's literature. In the fateful year of 1936, she started working as a librarian at the first Autonomous University of Barcelona, and she also completed two years of an Arts Degree during the Civil War.

It was at this time that her first book of poetry Epigrames i cançons [Epigrams and Songs] (1938), was a finalist for the 1937 Joaquim Falguera Prize. This was published with a "Letter-Prologue" by the maestro, Carles Riba, in which one fins the following words, "You seek to preserve your intimacy in prefixed, brief and clean ambits". Indeed, one can detect in this volume the aesthetics of the Noucentistes [members of the early twentieth-century politico-cultural movement in the service of bourgeois reformism] and Catalan post-symbolists, along with a good part of the European poetic tradition. Present, too, are the mainstays of her poetic career: love, almost always star-crossed, solitude and the desire to capture the mystery of nature in order to fuse with nature.

After the war, the purge of Generalitat (Catalan Government) civil servants meant that she was no longer able to keep working in her profession as librarian. Yet, for all its violence, the repression could not break her convictions. On the contrary, Leveroni became one of the main activists in the group that formed around Carles Riba, who was then the leader of the movement for cultural recovery. Besides writing for the clandestine reviews Poesia (1940) and Ariel (1946), she acted as a point of contact for the intellectuals in exile and, as noted above, it was Leveroni who was in charge of distributing Riba's Elegies de Bierville (1943) among the resistance. In the 1940s, she took part several times in the "Jocs Florals" literary competitions organised by the exiles. Her "Dotze cançons" [Twelve Songs] won the Catalan Language Jocs Florals of London (1947); while "Tres poemes" won the Lee Publishing House Prize in the Catalan Language Jocs Florals of Paris (1948). Continue reading...