Avel·lí Artís-Gener, Tísner

I've rejected the generic title that has the relative pronoun who as its starting point for one simple, powerful reason. I have no answer to the question – and this I confess with some embarrassment – though I've been asking it again and again for no less than seventy years and have never come up with anything plausible in response. I can't say, then, who I am but what I am and, even then, only approximately. If I'd had to answer the question when I was a cartoonist I would have used a sketch, in the style of the ones Leonardo da Vinci did and maybe even the accompanying explanations would have needed to be read with a mirror. Imagine the contrivance I use as a self-portrait. It's a big copper funnel that must be thirty centimetres across the mouth. The whole thing, from the top to the extreme end of the cone, must measure about the same. The entire structure plugs into a glass flask, discretely medium-sized, transparent and slightly tinted with phthalocyanine green. Now you can see why I write but just let me conclude the matter of the funnel likeness. It's the receptacle of my self-education. Over eighty years I've been pouring into it an awesome heap of trifles. You've seen that the mouth is wide but the bottom end of the funnel is very narrow and, accordingly, things drop down into the flask very laboriously. [...] Eighty years devoted to clogging a funnel with very compact things which hurt as they passed through a duct that implacably squeezed them. Finally they ended up in the bottle, the flask tinged green with a touch of phthalocyanine. Things have dropped slowly down into the lower receptacle. The glassy nature of the flask gives them an elongated optical shape. Why I write. I do it to relate the impressions of this whole elongated muddle, the things piled up in my eighty-one-year-old glass flask. Everything's there, then – wars and boxers, actors and construction bosses, surveyors and other poets, violinists and schoolteachers, emperors and wall-paperers, aviators like Louis Blériot and cosmonauts like Armstrong, et cetera, and they've nourished my life and instilled in me a mad desire to share it with someone. May no one be surprised by my chaotic way of going about things, good-for-nothing by nature as I am, or by my having my way with a string of ill-digested facts. With this, I justify the fact that in my books I've striven to explain in detail everything I've seen inside the flask, through this perception of mine, scant and adulterated, slightly tinged with green, which is apt since it is the colour of hope.

"Què (qui, com) sóc i per què escric" (What (Who, How) I Am and Why I Write), in L'Escriptor del mes (Writer of the Month). Barcelona: Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, 1992.

Avel·lí Artís-Gener, Tísner

(Nou diccionari 62 de la literatura catalana – New Dictionary 62 of Catalan Literature)

Barcelona, 1912-2000. Fiction writer, journalist, puppeteer, set designer and painter. He trained as a set designer and cartoonist and very soon became interested in journalism. He worked as an editor in the weekly Bandera and with newspapers like L'Opinió, La Rambla and La publicitat, frequently using the name of Tísner. He signed his satirical caricatures in L'Esquella de la Torratxa, La Campana de Gràcia and El Be Negre with the same pseudonym. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Republican Army. When the war ended he was imprisoned in France, after which he emigrated with his family to Mexico, where he was to live for twenty-six years during which time he worked as a cartoonist, publicist, painter and set designer. Meanwhile, his newspaper articles and other activities were staunchly committed to informing the public about Catalan culture. He returned to Barcelona in 1965 and very soon began to participate in cultural and political life. As a journalist and cartoonist he worked for Tele-Exprés, Tele-Estel, El Noticiero, and Avui. He also took part in the campaigns for standardisation of the Catalan language, in congresses and in Catalan language associations. He wrote books for children and young people and worked as a translator. In recognition of his work he was awarded the Jaume I Prize (1986) and the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes (Catalan Letters Prize of Honour, 1997), among others. Continue reading...