Maria-Mercè Marçal

Ivars d'Urgell, 1952 - Barcelona, 1998. Poet, novelist, translator and essayist. She completed her secondary schooling in Lleida and studied Classical Philology at the University of Barcelona where she soon came to know other young poets (Ramon Pinyol, Xavier Bru de Sala and, later, Miquel Desclot, Jaume Medina...) with whom she would found the publishing venture "Llibres del Mall" in 1973. She married Ramon Pinyol with whom she lived for four years. In 1976, she was awarded the Carles Riba Poetry Prize for Cau de llunes (Den of Moons – 1977), thus making her appearance as one of the most innovative voices of the 1970s literary generation, along the lines of Brossa and Foix at their most surrealist. At the same time, her political struggle in the closing years of the Franco dictatorship took specific form when she joined PSAN (Socialist Party of National Liberation) and participated in the Assembly of Catalonia. She was teaching Catalan Language and Literature, a profession in which she continued to work. She also began speaking and writing about feminism and literature and would become one of the most solid theoreticians in the field. In 1979, she created the Feminism section at the Catalan Summer University of Prada, coordinating this until 1985 and working on numerous projects, exhibitions, and pro-independence, feminist and lesbian publications. Some of her poems were set to music by singers of the Nova Cançó (New Song) movement. In 1979 she published Bruixa de dol (Witch in Mourning), her second collection of poems, which was to seal her success. In 1980, she participated in the foundation of Nacionalistes d'Esquerra (Left Nationalists), but gradually moved towards purely cultural militancy working on the task of linguistic recovery. When her daughter Heura was born in the same year Marçal was to cope with her maternity alone, a crucial experience, which she elaborates in poetic form in Sal oberta (Open Salt – 1982) – a book dominated by the sonnet and permeated by the popular tradition in which the range of imagery extends to salt, sea and ivy (heura) – and also in the second part of La germana, l'estrangera (Sister, Stranger – 1985). The latter book recovers a brief earlier collection consisting of fifteen sestinas, Terra de mai (The Never Land – 1982). In 1989, her complete poetic works, including Desglaç (Thaw), were collected in Llengua abolida (1973-1988) (Abolished Tongue (1973 – 1988). After 1994, she worked to consolidate the women writers’ collective of the Catalan PEN Club Centre, organising meetings, functions in homage to women writers, panel discussions, especially in the fields of poetry and essay. She also worked with the "Filosofia i gènere" (Philosophy and Gender) group of the University of Barcelona, which was coordinated by her companion Fina Birulés, and this part of her work led her to establish relations with the Italian philosopher Luisa Muraro, among others.

Running through her poetry are the signs of a passionate, free and hence risky adventure. This is based on the triple rebellion that inaugurates the poem “Divisa” in Cau de llunes, a collection that expresses the main thrust of her work where her thematic motifs are organised around the key question of female identity. Love, solitude, non-communication, passion, maternity, rebellion, and so on, are sub-themes. Going against everything that our culture has defined as femininity, the early collections take the moon as the privileged image of a certain feminine ideal, subverting its traditional subordination to solar light. The tension between the poetic “I”, the moon and shadow – an unexplored, uncontrolled zone – appears as the basic triangular schema that in Terra de mai (1982) turns crisis into the momentary achievement of Utopia. In La germana, l'estrangera she embarks on a process of introspection in which she rejects or questions the traditional images of the female “I”: the child killer, impostor, the guilty party, mother, daughter, lover, sister, stranger … Shadows reflected in a fathomless mirror. Shadow, wound and blood – dammed-up blood becoming a petrified fossil. With La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994), a novel about the lesbian poet Pauline M. Tarn, she reveals herself as a great novelist in the creativity of her prose, the book’s audacious structure and the formulation of a universe that is squarely in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. She also translated works by Colette, Yourcenar, and Leonor Fini and, with the collaboration of Mònika Zgustová, the Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. Notable too, in the field of essay are Contraclaror (Against the Light – 1985), her study and anthology of Clementina Arderiu, and the anthology Paisatge emergent. Trenta poetes catalanes del segle XX (Emerging Landscape. Thirty Twentieth-century Catalan Women Poets – 1998), which she compiled and edited with other women writers. Then again are the key articles "Rosa Leveroni, en el llindar" (Rosa Leveroni on the Threshold – 1986) and "Com en la nit, les flames" (As in the Night, the Flames – 1998), on Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.

Who I Am and Why I Write

I can’t give a detailed account of the years that separate that little girl from the woman who’s trying to answer the double question of “who I am and why I write”. Some landmarks appear schematically in the biographical note at the end of this publication. At first glance, I am seduced when I see, in the mirror of my verse, of my books, the reflection of a snake and its changes of skin: mutations that speak and yet remain mute. The snake is perhaps the one that my mother used to say was up there in the attic, her intention being to prevent me from climbing up there on a ladder that was too shaky. I stealthily climbed up to two or three rungs before the top and saw it, saw the snake and how it was awakening and, in my terror, I rushed all the way back down the ladder. Only to go back, again and again, without being able to stop myself. Temptation or challenge, transgression and need: writing. The snake-inhabited attic was there in the house where we went to live when we left the farm, the seeds of that first move. The first metaphor perhaps. [With the words mudes que parlen i alhora resten mudes, Marçal is playing with the double sense of mudes, which as a noun means “changes” and, as an adjective, “mute” in the feminine form, so that she is also suggesting mute women that speak but still remain mute – translator’s note.]