Pilar Arnau: "Devora Llompart was a great woman"

PalmPilar Arnau's interest in Josep Maria Llompart dates back a long time, and began far from the Balearic Islands: it was at the University of Bochum, in Germany, where Arnau began to discover the unattainability of his figure. Now, a couple of decades later, she has written As long as I have a shred of breath left. Josep Maria Llompart de la Peña: a multifaceted man at the service of his country, a 300-plus-page biography published by Quid Pro Quo.

You wrote a much shorter first biography of Josep Maria Llompart back in 2011. Is this the definitive one, or does Llompart's career warrant a few more volumes?

— [Laughs] Look, everything can always be expanded and improved, and if I'd been a year older, perhaps this volume would have had a hundred more pages. But I think it's a pretty complete biography.

The fact that he was so versatile makes it difficult to define and summarize his influence.

— It's unreachable, Llompart; his public life has many facets. I'd very much like to delve into his correspondence, but it's a task I estimate would take me about three years, and I must have three years to do it.

Do you remember when you first became interested in Josep Maria Llompart?

— Yes, I remember. I was a Catalan lecturer at the University of Bochum and I volunteered to create a Catalan library, and they gave me a budget for each year that I used to buy new releases and classics. And I hit the Son Armadans Papers, where I first started seeing Llompart's name and reading about him. It must have been in the early 90s.

And since then, his path has been finding itself again and again.

— I've done other things too, right? [Laughs] But yes, for example, I wanted to fold all the prologues, which was a challenge. A university professor told me it would be impossible to locate them all, but I wanted to do it. We're talking about the most prolific prologue writer in Catalan, probably, of the 20th century. They may be circumstantial, but others are literary studies.

Llompart editor, Llompart poet, Llompart activist, Llompart cultural manager... Which one do you choose?

— I would highlight, above all, the civic aspect. The Mallorca of the 1980s and 1990s would not have been possible without Llompart. He never said no to anyone, and I believe his days must have lasted more than 24 hours. He was extremely important for the recovery of the language and democracy, among many other things. Now, we sometimes forget another element in all this.

Which?

— That's why he was able to do all this because when he got home he had a full fridge, something that neither you nor I have.

What does it mean?

— He didn't have to worry about domestic matters. He had someone at his side, Encarna Viñas, who took care of all this and who, moreover, had a very high intellectual level. She had read a lot before meeting him. And I don't like the whole "behind every great man there's always a great woman" thing at all, but in this case there was a devotee, one who made it easier for him to dedicate himself to political issues, normalization, and the history of literature, a field in which he was also a pioneer.

Would it be possible for a woman today to achieve everything Llompart did?

— I can't tell you. What I see is that things haven't changed as much as we thought they would. Women work, yes, but we still worry about many, many things. No matter how feminist you are, you still have that internalized.

Of all the things you've been told about Llompart, which one has surprised you the most?

— I'll never share some of them because they're from his private life. I've been told a lot about his public life because, in reality, everyone in Mallorca considers Llompart something of their own, and that means there are plenty of people who can or will give you information.

Reviewing his career means encountering many of the great names in 20th-century Catalan literature and culture.

— That's why I'm also interested in his correspondence, because he corresponded with people like Salvador Espriu. But he participated in meetings of the Institute of Catalan Studies as well as a local poetry recital in Campanet; he tried to be everywhere. He went to the Catalan Summer University, in Prada, and also maintained relations with the Valencian Community, with people like Manuel Sanchis and Guarner: they would call each other to explain if one of them had been graffitied or if they'd received an anonymous letter. And then there are things like Marià Villangómez helping them organize their honeymoon: Llompart has this image of a patriarch, but he was also a very friendly, empathetic, and ironic man.

The situation of Catalan has changed a lot since the 1970s and 1980s. Having delved so deeply into the career of a man who made such an active contribution, how do you assess the current situation?

— I think a lot of time has been wasted. Politicians, regardless of their party, have never believed it. They haven't given Catalan its importance. And now they seem to realize what's happening, but in the meantime, there has been no linguistic acceptance or self-esteem policies or anything like that. Ten years ago, after Bauzà, it would have been a good time to do all this; I don't know if we'll ever have another as good one. The situation of Catalan is a failed subject at the political level.

And there's no reverse gear?

— Look, I was in Quebec years ago, among other things because I was interested in the language policy there. But they believe in it there, and they allocate resources. And they have proactive policies, but also punitive ones, and they have laws that serve to protect the language. Here, we don't even apply the few we have, and this is very sad. And then we want people who arrive with low cultural levels, functional illiterates, who often work in precarious situations, to be held to a level that we don't demand of doctors or nurses. Linguistic substitution isn't just a consequence of demographic substitution; it's also due to a lack of policies in favor of language.