Difficult it is

It has been a long time since Edicions Poncianes published anything new, which is why it has been a joy that this very special label has brought to light a most interesting volume: Difàcil, the new title by Manel Ollé, a professor of Chinese History and Culture at Pompeu Fabra University, translator, critic, and, above all, a poet of outstanding career who has deserved prestigious awards such as the Ciutat de Palma Joan Alcover de Poesia prize with Mirall negre, the Sant Cugat Poetry prize in memory of Gabriel Ferrater with Bratislava o Bucarest and the Jocs Florals de Barcelona prize with Un grapat de pedres d’aigua, among others.Difàcil continues the integrative line of different textualities within the framework of the page, that is, it is certainly a book of poems, but these are presented through different modalities. On the one hand, prose poems that combine with verses that are either free or presented with various metric resources: haikus, haibuns, decasyllables… Each proposal has, of course, a different breath, a detail that contributes to the richness of resources. Furthermore, there are different themes and registers: pages that delve into "the palace of memory" (with a multitude of trips around the globe, even excursions to curious corners like those in the film Léolo, by Jean-Claude Lanzon), streams that seem like dreams or surreal scenes (which function as independent stories that could have been included without any hesitation in Combats singulars. Antologia del conte català contemporani edited by Ollé himself), texts that delve into the impossibility of faithful representation through the insistence of the letter… Regarding this field, in his film La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard has the politicized characters say that "art is not a reflection of reality, but the reality of the reflection," and some fragments of Difàcil seem to arrive at this same conclusion, especially those that reflect on the natural idiosyncrasy of any copy (one of the themes that Manel Ollé dealt with in the book Plagia millor!) or rewriting, and here the author establishes fruitful dialogues with illustrious rewriters such as Josep Carner, Miquel Bauçà and Josep Palàcios. Two more arts can be linked to Difàcil: architecture and music. Regarding the former, Manel Woodcutter Song's illustrations seem like psychogeographic maps that trace the increasingly complex and labyrinthine journey of the pages as they progress. Regarding the latter, various artists like John Cage are mentioned not in vain: let's recall what Cage said about silence being impossible, there is always the background hum of our body, an idea that hovers over the spirit of a book born from a telephone spark and a creative flare that grows and expands from rereads and rewrites.