Jaume Vidal Alcover

Jaume Vidal Alcover (1923-1991) spent his childhood and adolescence between Manacor, his birthplace, Palma where he moved at the age at the age of ten to start his secondary schooling, and Mal Pas in Port d'Alcudia where, at the age of thirteen, he learned that the summer of 1936 would be unlike any other. The imminence of war obliged the family to leave their summer house, the Salern of his fictional writings, and return to Manacor [...].

Jaume Vidal spent the years of his early manhood in the semi-clandestine, plush and comfortable salons of cultural life in a small city. His friend Martí Mayol [...] took him to the soirees of the Massot brothers where, in 1945 and 1946, Vidal read some of his first poems. He met some fusty old poets and a few younger ones like Miquel Dolç. As a result of these early readings, Francesc B. Moll asked him for a book of poems to be published in the "Les Illes d'Or" collection but the project never came to fruition. The volume is called El ball del pensament [The Dance of Thought] and brings together poems written between 1942 and 1948 (according to the manuscript) or up to 1950, according to the author's words. At the same time, Vidal had published some poems in Spanish in the weekly newspaper of Manacor. In sum, as he himself recognised, these are samples of a style "under the sway of school readings of "Siglo de Oro" (Golden Age) writers, of fable writers and Spanish romantics as well as his admiration for the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and the tastes of Mallorcan writers (Costa i Llobera, Joan Alcover, Marià Aguiló, Tomás Aguiló, Pere d'Alcàntara Penya, Miquel dels Sants Oliver and Pere Orlandis...)". Vidal had begun to read these authors as a student of French language and Literature at secondary school [...]. Moll's offer to publish was, then, not at all surprising. However, Moll [as Vidal has it], whether out of distraction or lucidity "had the good taste to lose it [El ball del pensament] and not find it" until Vidal took him his second collection L'hora verda [The Green Hour], which came out six months after the finishing touches had been given "before the luminous waters of Port de Pollença".

Before the appearance of L'hora verda, and during the period of his tangential contacts with the insular literary circles, Vidal had spent some winters in Madrid, where he moved in the university year of 1941-1942 to start studying Law. In this city, towards the end of the decade, he joined a set of young people of the Congregación Mariana (a group akin to the Legion of Mary), the headquarters of which was in calle Zorilla. Here they organised all kinds of gatherings to which they gave the highly refined name of "Mañanitas del rey David" (King David's Serenades). These were the same years, more or less, of the meetings, in Mallorca, of the "Lluïsos de Madrid" group, in carrer Savellà in Palma, where father Miquel Batllori founded the Mallorca Academy of History, a section of the Congregación Mariana, where such names as Edgar Allan Poe and Rosselló-Pòrcel started to be familiar to new writers. A third city, Barcelona, where the young Vidal moved in 1943 to continue his studies, and where he lived with an agnostic, bibliophile uncle who haunted second-hand bookshops, gave him the chance to read the authors and works distributed and discussed in the Estudi group, among them Rimbaud, Rilke and Valéry. Some of these writers clashed head on with the modernist education of Jaume Vidal. In Vidal's words, in Estudi circles, "sure rhyme and verses that were too well scanned were irremissibly discarded". Continue reading...