2026, Joan Alcover and Blai Bonet Year

It's already March 2026, which means we're fully immersed in the simultaneous celebrations of the Joan Alcover Year and the Blai Bonet Year. From the author of The Balanguera We commemorate the centenary of his death, while we celebrate the centenary of the birth of the poet from Santanyí. Obviously, centenaries and other more or less round numbers are mere pretexts, as is the reason itself—whether they were born, died, or made their First Communion. What matters is the will and the act of celebrating the memory and work of two of our greatest poets. It is always good to remember what T.S. Eliot said: that peoples who do not honor their poets are barbarian peoples. We Mallorcans (like the Menorcans, the Ibizans, and the Formenterans) are not barbarians, and that is why we do not forget to pay homage to our poets, those who wield the language of the tribe the farthest and highest. Which in our case, as everyone knows except for some stubborn fool, is the Catalan language.

Let's repeat that, we're not talking about just any two people. Joan Alcover is one of the most outstanding authors of Catalan Romanticism at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and along with Miquel Costa i Llobera (another giant, like his own). Formentor pineThey are the leading figures of the so-called Majorcan School, a movement that was pivotal in the evolution of Catalan-language literature towards full modernity. Alcover, moreover, as we have already mentioned, is the author of The BalangueraA poem that not only has high symbolic value in itself, but (in the version set to music by Amadeu Vives) has been the official anthem of Mallorca since 1996. Alcover's work excels in elegiac poems, in laments (as is easily understood from his life, so unfortunate in terms of significant losses: he was widowed twice, to Rosa Pujol and Maria del Haro, and of the five children he had with both, four died). To say that poems like The relic and Desolation They deserve to be included in any anthology of late European Romanticism; this is not an exaggeration.

Blai Bonet, for his part, is a mystical and sensual visionary, author—as both poet and novelist—of one of the most captivating, exalted, and illuminating literary works of his time, easily comparable to those of other great contemporary authors, such as the Greek Katzanzakis and the Italian Pasolini. Bonet's verses impressed Lou Reed, who recited them with enthusiasm, and the greatness of his work only increases with time, not least through the influence it has exerted on successive generations of writers. Young people are drawn to Blai Bonet because Blai Bonet was, and remains, forever young.

Both centenaries begin by having resolved, and very well, the main need when we talk about writers: that their work be available. A magnificent new edition has just been published. Poems The complete works of Joan Alcover, edited by Ignasi Moreta, are published by Edicions 62. The complete poetry of Blai Bonet is also found in a now-legendary volume from Edicions, originally published in 1984, edited by Nicolau Dols and Gabriel de la ST Sampol, with a prologue by Margalida Pons, which has just been reissued in a corrected and expanded edition. His novels are available in reissues from Club Editor (the incendiary novel has just been released). Haceldama), and the diaries, also indispensable, are available thanks to the Adia publishing house. Everything is ready, therefore, for institutions, schools, institutes, universities, writers, media outlets, and everyone else to get down to "alcovering" and "blaibo cleaning" the Catalan Countries.