Jordi Sarsanedas

Jordi Sarsanedas is a poet, fiction writer and translator. He has an Arts degree from the University of Toulouse (Languedoc) and has taught French language and literature in Barcelona. Between 1948 and 1950, he was a language tutor at Glasgow University, after which he went to live in Milan (1958-1961). Besides his work as a poet and fiction writer, he has also been a theatre director as well as being active in many other cultural initiatives. He was editor of the post-war review Ariel, a founder-member and director of the Agrupació Dramàtica de Barcelona [Barcelona Dramatic Society], president of the Catalan PEN Centre, and president of the Ateneu Barcelonès (1997-2003). In 1994 he was awarded the Catalan Letters Prize of Honour.

One fine day in 1947, I found myself writing. Naturally, I had learned how to write many years before, along paths laid out by Maria Montessori, if such detail is necessary. But the day I am referring to I, with more cheerful artlessness and zest than declared ambition, entered the domain of literary life, which I nonetheless felt was radically serious.

The poems that I wrote then and that I would subsequently publish in my first book A trenc de sorra (Crack in the Sand) were exhibited in the Pictòria Gallery as manuscripts in Indian ink along with works -painting and sculpture- of friends of mine with which we presented the Grup de Vuit (Group of Eight), to the great unhappiness of the police because in those days they didn't like people coming together in groups. Now that I have a chance to mention it, I'd like to say that I've always felt very close to the plastic arts and not only because I was well-schooled by my father, who was one of the people who introduced the Japanese lacquer art of urushi into Catalonia, or because my wife, Núria Picas, is a painter.

The fact that I found myself writing at the age of twenty-five should not be too surprising. I'd been prepared for this. I'd had the good luck to attend a school where books published by Protectora came into our hands and where the atmosphere permitted reading to be done in good faith, as well as the privilege of having books at home: the collections of "Bernat Metge", "Els nostres clàssics" (Our Classics), the volumes of "Biblioteca literària" (Literary Library), "Biblioteca catalana" (Catalan Library), the orange series books of Proa ... And then there was poetry: a little of Carner, Sagarra, Salvat-Papasseit, Verdaguer ... I read a lot, tumultuously, everything I could get my hands on, mixing titles in the most unjustifiable fashion -Jules Verne and Dostoevsky, Folch i Torres and Aldous Huxley- but, or so I'd like to believe, acquiring with each reading a certain level of benefit, more or less deep, even if it was very little. And when exile obliged me to start teaching French, the "text commentaries" I had to prepare ensured that I would come to be grateful to a few good teachers, Villon, Ronsard, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Gérard de Nerval... So, one might suppose that, at some or other point in this education, in Catalonia or France, I must have felt the prick of the spur that has come down to us reflected in the phrase Anch'io son pittore. Again, it is quite clear that the work of writing for the classroom -narration, dissertation, which I had accepted in good faith, had also constituted a form of apprenticeship that was not to be totally disdained.

So it was that I found myself writing. Out of those early poems -very naturally, very smoothly, if I can trust my memory of how I experienced it, and without noting any change in my attitude towards writing- came other texts, some stories that I called Mites (Myths). It seemed to me that I justified the choice of this title by including in the text I had to provide for the flap of the first-edition volume a couple of lines I had found in an article published in Partisan Review after many of the stories were already finished. I said that the myth is principally a kind of literature in which the characters and events are enveloped in an aura of strange and prodigious meaning, and that myth is halfway between the dream and non-mythical literature. In fact, because of the requirements of the publishers, the volume was completed by stories of a very different type, which earned me the remark of one critic who said I was a "bicephalus writer". That was the time in which I started to work as an editor in the review Ariel. Continue reading...