Francesc Parcerisas

Francesc Parcerisas' poetry is mainly collected in the volume Triomf del present (Triumph of the Present: Poems (1965-1983)), which represents one of the most wide-ranging and yet consistent contributions of his generation to the panorama of contemporary Catalan literature. His poetry, with its clear affinities with the Anglo-Saxon tradition, started out as being linked with the realism that was dominant in a good part of the poetic scene of the 1960s, for example Vint poemes civils (Twenty Civil Poems) and Homes que es banyen (Men Bathing). Later, after testing the experimentalism of the 1970s with the work Latitud dels cavalls (Latitudes of Horses), he would start writing a more intimate kind of poetry with sober echoes of the classics and revealing deep moral concerns.

I am a product of the 1940s middle-class bourgeoisie in Catalonia, with the bitter contradictions that entails and the subtle richness that tends to go hand in hand with the contradictions. I was born in Begues, a small town in the coastal range but I consider that my education is urban, if Barcelona at the end of the 1940s with flocks of sheep blocking the tramlines, rubbish carts and the smell of boiled cabbage was really a city in the sense we give the word nowadays.

Country and city were connected and blended together despite the toll-houses, in an interaction that is very different from what we have at present, and having gone from home to school catching lizards or breaking up processions of bilious green caterpillars in the environs of the fence of the monastery garden -a monastery full of cloistered monks who, at the midday mass on Sundays, sang spectrally from behind operatically dramatic bars- does not prevent me from mythologizing in equal parts my memories of nature and my bedazzlement before the enormous multihued cardboard toys hanging from the columns and ceilings of the city's only department stores, or the enchantment produced by the penetrating smell of burning wax -not oil- of the silver-plated racing cars that trained for the Penya Rhin race, stridently and speedily crossing in front of the esplanade with the fountain where we went for the Ash Wednesday ceremony of burying the sardine.

We were "city folk" when we went to the country, but our city was still half rural, and more so, I think now, than most present-day medium-sized towns. We had chickens on the roof terrace, killed rabbits with a blow from the mortar to the back of the neck and spread the skins out to dry in the sun; crickets and glow-worms were put into a little cage constructed ad hoc, and all of that mingled with the first discoveries of, and changes in the world -of the remote world and the close-to-hand one- changes that brought into being, with blatant delay, the shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

At times it still surprises me that someone can evoke periods or events without being worried about the exactness of the memory, the exactness of the context in which memory moves, and I am even more flummoxed when somebody believes that looking back to the past is pure nostalgia. Discussion then becomes difficult for me because I feel we are not talking about the same matter and that my hypothetical interlocutor has not understood a single thing. The same thing happens to me when, if we are talking about love and passion, somebody thinks we are making some kind of witless list of occasional adventures that are -and were- perforce trivial matters, and not analysing the stages of our essential shaping as human beings.

When all is said and done, these two components of memory and passion constitute, as I understand it, one of the mainstays of life -and evidently of literature. I leapt from reading Jules Verne in the Cadete Collection to reading Muñoz Pabón in the school library, Pío Baroja in the Caro Raggio editions and Hemingway in the maladroit Spanish editions. And, only a few years later, but now considerably shaken up, I was reading Sartre, Malraux and the nouveau roman in the Livre de Poche or 10/18 editions. Of all these books what I remember is a "climate" that still endures and this atmosphere is certainly the setting for my passion for books: for reading, for writers, for the very objects that books are because, as an excellent poet from León has remarked, books are "among those places where life is safe from the successive smash-ups". Continue reading...