This paper was presented at the 3rd Round Table of European Poetry (Sigulda, Latvia, 8-12 September 2001).
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Catalan version
I am from Catalonia, which is a small territory without any frontiers at the western end of the Mediterranean, and our capital is Barcelona. In Catalonia every year we celebrate our national day on the eleventh of September. This is in memory of the fall of Barcelona in seventeen fourteen at the hands of the Spanish and French armies under the Bourbon pretender to the Spanish crown. (Not for the first time, we had chosen to fight on the wrong side.) But in Catalonia there is also an unofficial national day: the twenty-third of April, the day of Saint George ("Sant Jordi", in Catalan). It is a day of books and roses and for people in love, a splendid popular celebration which was adopted by the UNESCO some years ago, and there is now an attempt to export it to other parts of the world. I would like to read to you what one Catalan poet recorded in his notebook on the evening of the twenty-third of April last year, at the end of Saint George's day. (The people involved are referred to as A, B C and D.)
In a bookshop in the middle of Barcelona, poets are invited to take part in a Poetry Marathon, organised by A and B, who are critics and poets, and broadcast by the radio channel devoted to Catalan culture. I am one of the first to go, at twelve midday. When I get there, I find out that the radio will only be there in the afternoon, and there is C reading a poem sitting on a chair placed on two tables whose legs have been piously draped in the Catalan flag, but the noise of the place makes poetry reading impossible. A little later, D has to ask me to help her down from the improvised platform, which is too high. The bookshop was filling up, but in spite of the microphone, nobody seems to be taking much notice of the master of ceremonies or the different poets, who are reading and speaking from their little corner as if they were saying their prayers in a motorway tunnel. I fidget on my uncomfortable seat and at the same time I have a vague suspicion that there is a strange element of truth in this image of poets up on this improbable but very Catalan stage, speaking in the middle of this impressive stream of readers and children and publishers and journalists and books and roses and conversations and the ring of the cash registers and the warning notes of the magnetic detector at the door if someone tries to get out unscathed …
I have allowed myself this autobiographical detour because, although it is anecdotal, it helps me to give you an idea of the current status of poetry in Catalonia. I come from a country where poetry has at times enjoyed a very high symbolic role. We had a glorious medieval past: glorious both politically and in literature, with names like Ramon Llull, Ausiàs March and Tirant lo Blanc as some of the most outstanding. But then until the nineteenth century we suffered a repression of the literary use of Catalan and what is known as a sense of identity, but this sparked off a romantic Renaissance (the "Renaixença"), parallel to the Rissorgimento in Italy and similar movements elsewhere in Europe. In Catalonia poetry was central to this Renaissance and it led to the restoration of a kind of poetic Olympics, known as the Floral Games ("Jocs Florals"). From that time, poets - or at least some of them - have held an odd but privileged status as a national symbol, an indispensable spokesperson, a spiritual force.
These days, with our autonomous Catalan government, with the economy more an more dominated by the service industries, and with the commercialisation of culture, things have become normalised, though not completely. Poets and their works still have a public presence that is significantly greater than their actual sales would justify. Our poets complain —like all poets, I suspect— that their public impact is slight, although a select group belong to a standard package of institutionalised Catalan culture: children learn verses in primary school and recite them at home on Christmas Day; in many towns and villages you will find streets and statues and schools and libraries named for a poet; the literary supplements are full of their fads and opinions; many local councils —no doubt uncertain as to how to spend the culture budget— arrange poetry competitions which on occasion lead to the publishing of books that are then badly distributed and little read, and so on.
In Catalonia and other Catalan-speaking lands the annual publication of titles in Catalan stands at seven thousand. Catalonia also publishes seventeen thousand titles in Spanish and it is to be noted that Barcelona shares with Madrid and Mexico world leadership in this language. Of the seven thousand titles in Catalan that appear each year, some two hundred are books of poetry, normally with a print run of one thousand, of which the autonomous government usually buys between two and three hundred. These books cost between seven and twelve euros and, even with the passage of time, they are unlikely to be sold out. There are a few exceptions. One is the most popular living poet, Miquel Martí i Pol, who is admired by footballers like Josep Guardiola and singers such as Lluís Llach. He usually sells between fiveteen and twenty thousand copies of his new books. And following the recent death of the young Maria-Mercè Marçal the re-issues of her books were sold out in just a few months.
Of the four most important Catalan publishers, two have active collections of poetry. These are Edicions Proa and Edicions 62, both based in Barcelona. With more than 200 titles, these collections are the oldest and most prestigious, and are therefore canonical. There are other interesting collections published outside Barcelona, including Majorca and Valencia (like those of Bromera, EUMO/Cafè Central, Moll, , Pagès, or Tres i Quatre), making up a total of ten more or less important collections. All these are "general" publishers (none of them publishes only poetry), but even the books in the best collections suffer, like all poetry books though perhaps less severely, from the lack of interest among the booksellers, who are under pressure from the constant flow of new titles in fiction and non-fiction, and from the modest sales of poetry.
The last ten years have seen an increase in the number of public poetry readings as well as the number of people attending these, which recently led one critic to maintain that poetry now has more listeners, but no more buyers, but it is still difficult to forge links between the authors and their potential readers. There is a significant void in help from periodicals: there aren't many of them, they are poorly distributed, and they show practically no inclination to run something that has not already been published elsewhere. The most important periodical, and the doyen, Reduccions, has barely 200 subscribers. However, a recent competition organised by one of Barcelona's main newspapers attracted, in just a few weeks, more than three thousand unpublished poems, half in Catalan and half in Spanish. This indicates that there is a significant gap between what is written in private and what is published; in the case of new authors, first publication is for the most part directly in the shape of a book. This is usually the result of one of the one hundred and sixty annual prizes, of which thirty lead to the publication of a book. Other options such as private publication, which was very common up to the middle of the twentieth century, collective volumes or publication on the Internet are proportionally very rare.
We Catalans often say jokingly that Catalonia has more poets than any other country. A recent Who's who of Catalan letters mentioned 600 people who had published a book of verse out of a total of 1.400 living writers who had published at least two literary books. And this from a Catalan-speaking population of only about six million! I was recently invited to the Festival de Trois-Rivières in Quebec, and when I was there, I was worried that Catalonia might lose that number one position. However, Quebec is very large and I think that we can at least continue to claim that Catalonia is one of the countries with the most poets per square kilometre... Leaving aside the commercial issues, the fact is that the quality of Catalan poetry in the twentieth century was extraordinary. After the great names of those who have passed on: Josep Carner, Carles Riba, J.V. Foix, Gabriel Ferrater, Salvador Espriu, Joan Vinyoli, Vicent Andrés Estellés, Joan Brossa, Maria-Mercè Marçal, every year there is a handful of noteworthy books that vie for the accolades of the critics. The most outstanding younger poets: Narcís Comadira , Francesc Parcerisas, Joan Margarit or Enric Casasses; alongside illustrious veterans like Josep Palau i Fabre, Jordi Sarsanedas or Màrius Sampere, enjoy after all a small but faithful group of followers who make of their new works something more than a mere publishing or commercial product.
Jaume Subirana
(translated from the Catalan by Norman Coe)
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[Published on: September 2001]
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