<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - We read]]> 10 <![CDATA[What is a mother capable of?]]> Many literary constructions are, in reality, the happy result of having managed to overcome technical challenges, that is to say, creative artifacts built upon hurdles that have enhanced, as the members of Oulipo always knew, know, and will know, the increasingly less secret motors of writing. The novel A Void, by Georges Perec, which we can enjoy in English thanks to the publisher Dalkey Archive Press with a masterful translation by Gilbert Adair, is one of the greatest examples of this: a fabulous story in which the author does not use any word that contains the letter E. No joke. However, let us not forget that forms as commonly used as sonnets or sestinas are, also, formal complications that invite us to overcome obstacles to convey the content we wish to express. 

]]> <![CDATA[Opening up with Herman Melville's Typee]]> Quid Pro Quo had already recovered The Encantadas, by Herman Melville, in a magnificent translation by Pep Julià, a sublime volume that the admired writer J. L. Badal had recommended to me with emphasis and with good reason. Now the beloved publisher from Pollença insists on this happy recovery operation with a Melville that is worth reading beyond Moby Dick, a marvel more than deservedly famous that has achieved universal fortune. However, Melville is much more than Moby Dick: it is one of the great bastions of modern American literature, an author capable of transmuting adventure, travel, the sea, nature, violence, and the clash between cultures into supreme literary matter. Typee, his first published book, written based on experiences lived during his years of sailing the South Seas, invites us to rediscover the power of a genius who already from the beginning possessed a more than ambitious literary capacity.Typee is a formidable adventure story, but it would be unfair to reduce it to just that. Herman Melville constructs a narrative in which the experience of an exotic world is readjusted as a profound exploration of the clash between cultural systems. The writer observes the customs, rituals, hierarchies, sensuality, and violence of this new world with a fascinating combination of curiosity, irony, and descriptive capacity, and turns estrangement into a laboratory for the radical displacement of one's gaze. Here we find a still-young Melville, yet already possessed of an astonishing faculty for transforming external adventure into moral and intellectual learning. Teresa Bauçà Bosch's translation has the merit of keeping such energy alive, of making a text flow that demands agility but also precision, and of preserving the tension between descriptive exuberance, the sense of adventure, and the concerns that mark the work. Bauçà Bosch—who has already translated authors such as Wells, Tagore, Turgenev, Hawthorne, Emerson, Mary Shelley, and Dickens—once again demonstrates marked solvency here.We must defend this literature with enthusiasm, the kind that takes you far, the kind that brings you closer to unknown territories and, above all, the kind that changes our way of looking at things. Typee belongs to the lineage of books that help us re-mem-ber why we read classics: not because they are excellent museum pieces but because they challenge, move, and teach us. Quid Pro Quo, which has built much of its catalog on a determined commitment to recovering totems that maintain a fertile contemporary dialogue, offers a new and brilliant opportunity to return to the immense Melville. Enjoying Typee is to penetrate other lives, different and striking, a creative and empathetic possibility that confirms an enormous, complex, contradictory, and beautiful world, just what we need in these chaotic times full of absurd fear and hatred.

]]> <![CDATA[The religion of memories]]> Vincles,, by Feliu Formosa, in the prestigious Jardins de Samarcanda collection by Cafè Central, is a wonderfully lucid and moving book, a work in which the poet seems to want to stitch back together the essential threads of existence. The thirty-two poems that make up the volume, written in hexasyllables, recover a meter that the author had already explored in the Llibre de les meditacions and which here acquires a new, more restrained breath and, nevertheless, of high intensity. The book is read under the light of Cançoner, one of his masterpieces, and such importance is explicitly underscored in the note that closes the volume. It is not, therefore, a conventional retrospective exercise, but rather a purely poetic operation: returning to one's own life to discover what persists and which words can still give form to what has been lived.Feliu Formosa writes from his current situation in a nursing home, and memory continuously opens doors to other times and spaces, to decisive episodes of his trajectory, and to figures who have left deep imprints. The lectureship in Heidelberg during the 1959-1960 academic year, Maria Plans, Turin, or other psychogeographic places appear as beacons of an intimate cartography in which facts and corners are repositories of identity. This ability to make the present moment coexist with the successive layers of the past gives the book a special density: every memory is a way of reliving what seemed buried, lost.Maria Enrich's prologue aptly accompanies this new and precious poetic foray, while the presences of Bertolt Brecht and Joan Vinyoli place Vincles within a literary genealogy that the genius from Sabadell invokes not only from erudition but above all from a creative fraternity. Brecht is a beneficial tutelary shadow, a conscience that helps to exalt civil and expressive possibilities, and the winks to Vinyoli, from the very title, are tributes to a master and a friend. Vincles invites us to reconnect apparently paradoxical realities: the now and the yesterday, but also the poet and those elements that have grounded a powerful life itinerary. Deep down, it is a work about the need to re-mem-ber in the primordial sense that Blai Bonet gave to this verb: to pass through the heart again that which was lived so that it does not disappear completely. Formosa converts such a need into a form of creation and, also, into a form of consolation: poetry cannot restore lost time, no, but it can rescue its supreme melodies, it can resignify the vestiges and ensure that a life, by being evoked and recreated, continues to generate beauty. ‘Vincles, a serene and deeply moving work, confirms Feliu Formosa as one of the great living masters of Catalan poetry, a titan among us.

]]> <![CDATA[Unbeatable Blai Bonet award]]> On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the extraordinary writer from Santanyí, the City Council of Santanyí has promoted this year a new award that is undoubtedly very important from now on among its already consolidated literary recognitions: the Blai Bonet prize for contemporary thought, and the person who begins such a milestone this 2026 could not have been a better winner than Lucia Pietrelli, a powerful author who precisely adopted the Catalan language for literary creation –in the manner of other figures who abandoned their mother tongues to use languages of adoption such as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett and Agota Kristof– after the impact that the reading of the novel El mar, by Blai Bonet caused her. Her first and pioneering essay is titled Vestigis. Laberint amb pare en flames and has seen the light, like the other distinguished works, at AdiA Edicions.Vestigis starts from grief to turn it into a form of knowledge by transforming the intimate experience of the father's death into an inquiry of mythological, telluric, and cosmic dimensions. From this writing engine, some of the theories that Carl Gustav Jung built from alchemical processes of luminous wounds are confirmed: he warned us that we must, from our shit, make gold. And all this without falling into morbidity, as can be said of other recent and not-so-recent works that have set trends. Symbolically, the book seems written in the manner of a journey or heroic voyage from the inside of a labyrinth, a deep structure and explicit allegory of a consciousness that struggles to assimilate death and integrate it into life through different paths or corridors of a fragmentary nature. For this reason, it is appropriate that Joseph Campbell's reflections are part of a very detailed and quite complete bibliography alongside other great names of thought and literature, from the Greco-Roman mythological tradition to findings that could engage as equals with those of Pascal Quignard and Amélie Nothomb. From this perspective, we are facing an authentic and splendid European essay.The result is surprisingly clean, beautiful, and accessible, made of an allusive writing that never loses the capacity to communicate emotion and provoke commotion. Vestigis. Laberint amb pare en flames, by Lucia Pietrelli at AdiA Edicions, is a brave, creative, poetic, and Blaibonetian essay that does not suffer from the quagmires of the genre and shines with a hybrid writing that lifts a concrete anecdote and sublimates it into shared universal wisdom, since the accurate and dazzling final reflections arise from the very vibrant nerves of life's extreme tensions, those that lead us to the abysses of disappearance and emptiness and re-mind us what makes us human.

]]> <![CDATA[When a universe is confirmed even bigger]]>

Joan Miquel Oliver begins his literary comeback with a new literary work that confirms, amplifies, and enlarges his unique worldview of the world and the bubble: La vida no són matemàtiques at La Magrana. It is, in effect, a book that is difficult to categorize and, precisely for that reason, decidedly stimulating. More than a conventional succession of stories, the volume is built upon occurrences, anecdotes, intuitions, obsessions, discoveries, whims, jokes, pranks, and small epiphanies that unfold with an unbribable freedom. To say they are occurrences is, by no means, an objection: it is a way of stating and recognizing the singularity of a literature that does not need to submit to narrative conventions to end up being original. Oliver writes like someone opening unexpected windows to reality and letting in everything that usually remains off-camera. And in this highly personal universe, there can appear, with the same naturalness, the Alaska kiosk, the missed teacher Toni Artigues, Alexandra Schneider, and Jaume Ripoll, from Filmin, both turned into key pieces of a personal universe in which the daily, the absurd, the drift, and the revelation coexist with the joy of a festival.There is in this work a grace and a wit that are deeply Majorcan, but which Joan Miquel Oliver takes towards a space of his own, a kind of viticulture surrealism in which reality seems to have been slightly displaced from its usual axis. In this sense, the creative operation connects with that of Alice Rohrwacher, capable of capturing certain Italian essences without ever turning them into postcards. Oliver reaches similar milestones with Majorca and his beloved haunts: he gleans the absurdity, the chaos, the tenderness, the decadence, the bad temper, and he does so with the strange capacity to alchemically transform moth-eaten traditionalism into delicious delirium that has not been fully exploited until now. He also talks about films, songs, paintings, books, and life misfortunes that make up what could be the first step of an episodic autobiography.Perhaps the most interesting thing about La vida no són matemàtiques is that Joan Miquel Oliver does not limit himself to repeating the formulas we already know from his career: he expands his creative torrent and ventures towards an even more unpredictable, pioneering, and libertarian literature. Whoever reads it may be bewildered, evidently, because he does not always offer the usual coordinates of narratology or diarism, but this bewilderment is precisely a virtue: it forces one to abandon expectations, to let oneself be carried away, and to accept that literature can also consist of looking at the world from unsuspected angles. And this, in a headlong literature like ours, is a rarity that should be celebrated.

]]> <![CDATA[The strength of a voice exiled among the boats]]> Lluís Servera Sitjar is not only one of the best people you can be lucky enough to meet, but he is also an active man who has championed special projects such as the translation magazine Superna, a poet who undoubtedly must be taken into account for the quality of his verses full of wisdom, a translator of absolute reference who has provided us with exceptional works, a true cultural ambassador between the Catalan Countries and Italy. His latest beautiful task has been to translate into our language La barca, the very first book by the magnificent poet Mario Luzi, for the emblematic collection Jardins de Samarcanda of Cafè Central. It is not the first time we have enjoyed Luzi in Catalan – since Servera Sitjar himself translated La Passió. Via Crucis al Colosseu for La Fosca of Lleonard Muntaner, Editor – but the appearance of La barca is an excellent excuse to revisit it: the best readings are rereads. As the title itself indicates, La barca is an essentially maritime book, but let no one expect that what this delicious volume proposes is explicit, typical, or cliché: it is considered that with this work the first currents of the literary movement known as 'Italian hermeticism' were unleashed, that is, a writing with a tendency towards crypticness, concentrated languages, highly metaphorical expressiveness, admirable musicality, and a consubstantial use of each word. Such a will to write differently was quite voluntary: it was an intellectual, stylistic, and political reaction against the grandiloquent triumphalism of the fascist rhetorics of the time, but it was also an invitation to active participation during the reading process, and thanks to such a gesture the poem became a space open to multiple and rich interpretations. Therefore, what Mario Luzi powerfully achieves with these aquatic pages is to give us a series of delicious images, of scenes imbued with serenades and nocturnal songs in which fatal lovers cradle themselves amidst trembles of all kinds. La barca is the foundational miracle of a new poetry that changed the way of doing things in the 20th century with a brutal capacity for influence, and the magnificent work of Lluís Servera Sitjar transports all this to our linguistic code and our literary system with a fruitfulness that confirms, once again, the ties that bind us in the same framework: the Mediterranean. The boat, by Mario Luzi –with translation by Lluís Servera Sitjar in Jardins de Samarcanda by Cafè Central– is a beautiful, refreshing, moving book, a perfect classic for this summer but also for any season, and it is that the best poetry and the best translations have no expiration date. Enjoy these days, despite the heat, and we will read each other again in September. Good wishes!

]]> <![CDATA[Against the long and dark night of Francoism]]> You don't need to be a firefly to realize that the pendulum of History is once again swinging towards a repugnant rise of the right and far-right, a real shame that confirms that human beings are an idiotic animal that stumbles many times on the same stone. Faced with this, and even though it sometimes seems that Catalan literature tends to forget particular and collective realities, there are snipers who refuse to succumb to general inertia and misery. This is the happy case of a writer by birth who, in fact, does not conceive of life without writing: Joan Cavallé. The prolific and respected author from Tarragona publishes a new, magnificent and necessary novel, "La nit" (Angle Editorial). Full of symbols, metaphors, documentation, and winks at great works of universal culture, "La nit" consciously invites us to delve into the long and dark night of Francoism and the horror of a cruel and murderous dictatorship dominated by His Excellency, the oldest tyrant in Europe, as wisely called by Joan Brossa, so skillful that, despite passing away, he did it well enough to weave the vile business in such a way that everything remained tied up and well-tied. Thus begins Cavallé's journey: after a verse by Raimon that gives the volume its title, we penetrate the orbits of a young student who participates in a clandestine network and has a mission to carry out in stages, he is our Virgil in a social hell founded on fear.In addition to the courage to break silences, traumas, and mutisms, and to tell truths like temples related to the terrible present, La nit by Joan Cavallé demonstrates other high values: the ability to trace a psychogeographic map of a resistant Tarragona; the gift of dialoguing with an eternally revisited classic like James Joyce's Ulysses; the superb control of tempos and narratological rhythms when combining external landscape with internal introspection; the firm and perfect mastery of each sentence; expressiveness… Each page is marked with a high capacity to generate interest, suspense, exhilarating intensity. For all these reasons, La nit is a great novel and an unexpected surprise of this season that I will never tire of recommending.Joan Cavallé, fortunately, is not alone: there are other literary samurai such as Eduard Márquez, who did a radiography of this era with the colossal volume 1969 from L’Altra Editorial; or Julià de Jòdar, who with La casa tapiada from Comanegra continued to uncover the Great Betrayal that was the supposed Transition to democracy… These three recent and powerful proposals could be studied as one of the most important political trilogies of recent decades. In summary, La nit by Joan Cavallé is a masterful novel. 

]]> <![CDATA[Battleships]]> Lately I have returned to Friedrich Nietzsche and his powerful Ecce homo with a translation by the missed J. M. Terricabras from the defunct Accent Editorial. In one of the most vibrant passages, the German philosopher who used a hammer to think and write recalls a peak of personal decadence – shortly before setting out to write Human, All Too Human as an antidote – when he dedicated himself to ancient metrics with meticulous precision and ailing eyes. How tiresome. I agree with him: indeed, wasting time and effort on ancient metrics and stagnant little rhymes, a cultural reactionism that coincides with current political reactionism, is synonymous with decadence, and such agony, in recent times, seems to be gaining momentum and traction around us, especially among the younger generations, who seem to have hatched old. To combat such foolishness, such shortsightedness, it is advisable to read works that awaken new senses, that are created from the most radical independence and an expressiveness rich in resources and nuances, books with originality as an absolute foundation and imbued with the stubbornness to write against everything, despite everything. Few works align more with these principles than that of Lluís Maicas, one of the most prolific, genuine, and unique writers in Catalan literature spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.Responsible for more than a hundred titles of poetry, narrative, diary writing, and artistic works, Lluís Maicas returns to the commercial market – and I say this because many of his titles, which he calls "illegally distributed," can only be found at the Inca Library, the March Library, and the Library of Catalonia – with a precious volume: Claper de pedres fogueres in the Versos collection of the Aula de Poesia Jordi Jové of the Publications Service of the University of Lleida. I can add little to what Joan Pomar Mir explains in the magnificent prologue about the meaning of the claper, the main wall that supports the architecture of the collection, but I can say that it seems that both the author and the companion have fully absorbed the telluric, demiurgic sense of Damià Huguet, a craftsman of words with calluses up to his elbows from dedicating himself so much to a rampant, independent, fascinating creation.Each poem – which functions with its own entity but at the same time knows how to adhere to a larger unitary composition – is born from a tiny anecdote that becomes large, expansive, and explores personal and collective territories to make them wide, developing different writing techniques, from repetition to the Russian nesting doll game, and ends up building solemn monuments that do not renounce tenderness or irony, the provocative jab, the reconsecrated host, the end as a sublime punch. With Claper de pedres fogueres, Lluís Maicas gives us a masterpiece, another one. And there are already quite a few.

]]> <![CDATA[A sunbeam like a sob of pink grapes]]> For quite some time now, I have considered Ramon Ramon one of the most outstanding authors in contemporary Catalan literature. I have enthusiastically acclaimed his works such as the exceptional Els temps interromputs from Edicions del Buc and I read his diaries with the same eagerness that drives me to canonical titles in the genre, such as those provided by Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Feliu Formosa, and Lluís Maicas. The latest volume in Ramon Ramon's experiential cycle was the striking and inspiring L’any dels cinquanta. Dietari 2020 from Lleonard Muntaner, Editor. It is a very ambitious work that confirms him as a true master of precision. Far from turning the COVID confinement or reaching fifty into mere autobiographical motives, the wise writer transforms such experiences, the collective and the personal, into pillars that propel him towards a gaze that expresses itself with clairvoyant lucidity on the passage of time, the current situation of the Catalan Countries through ultra-local landscapes with universal echoes, the act of writing in this harsh 21st century, and the fragile human condition. Few intelligences have the power to elevate the quotidian to the category of a refined, shared idea, and Ramon Ramon is a wise and eloquent possessor of it.Ramon Ramon returns to verses, good news, with Mar de Xeraco from Edicions 96, in which the poet transforms a specific place in the geography of the Valencian Country into a mythical space endowed with extraordinary literary density, demonstrating that true universality is born from eyes that take deep roots. The sea, the clarity, the paths, and the silences do not appear as simple descriptive elements but as thought forms, as Perejaume would say. Ramon Ramon explores a moral territory from which he tenaciously questions memory, the cruelty of History, and the persistent persistence of beauty in a world subjected to constant changes. Ramon Ramon returns to a writing of contained but atrocious elegance, precise to the extreme, capable of turning each mental pearl into a powerful philosophical intuition and each apparently minor episode into a revelation about the human being. Ramon Ramon's literature advances by sedimentation, faithful to the rhythms of revelation, without superfluous ornaments or erudite displays, but with an emotion that soaks everything with the same tremendous force of waves that bring joy and also death. It is not superfluous to re-mind, to return things to the heart according to Blai Bonet, that Mar de Xeraco can also be read as a tribute to the longed-for Josep Piera, a Mediterranean titan.Each page of Mar de Xeraco by Ramon Ramon at Edicions 96 seems to want to make us aware that writing is, above all, a way of learning to look, and that in chaos we can find wonders that console us.

]]> <![CDATA[The legacies that slumber within us]]> Corcs, by Olívia Lund at Nova Editorial Moll, is a singular literary irruption, a first novel that is far from early, which addresses memories, recollection, inheritance, and identity from a radically lively and imaginative perspective. Through the figure of Glòria, the protagonist, the author constructs a tangle of stories in which the different pasts are not closed-off or disconnected territories, but a single invisible and active presence that beats beneath the complex and chaotic present surface. The repeated gestures, obsessions, words, condemnations, and extravagances of previous generations emerge unexpectedly, as if every family construct were made of organic matter that never ceases to transform in the alchemy of metamorphoses. Lund turns latent legacies into a very powerful force that traverses bodies, spaces, and epochs, and suggests that what we consider intimately ours is often also the echo of many other existences that have preceded us, a philosophical precept that would fit with Nietzschean conceptions of eternal return.One of the novel's successes is the way it dissolves the boundaries between historical times, personal experiences, and individual or collective imaginaries. Tumultuous loves, disappointments, episodes of madness, family myths, and popular legends coexist in the same stream that advances with visionary energy made of furious gusts, furiously lyrical, steeped in Faulkner and Lispector, in Blai Bonet and Antònia Vicens. Far from any accommodating folklorism, Corcs opts for good folklore in a disturbing and complex exploration of narratological mechanisms, delving into the landscapes of delirium, unconscious transmissions, and psycho-emotional persistences that shape us. All this is sustained by a very expressive language, rooted in the land but at the same time extraordinarily flexible, capable of combining poetic density and narrative intensity with thoughtful depth. It is quite normal that the great Antònia Vicens praises this formidable debut.With this first published work, and with a few awards under her belt, Olívia Lund confirms literary ambition and her own voice: she knows how to dialogue with ultralocal and universal traditions without getting bogged down. Corcs is a novel that digs into the deepest layers of collectivity, into the secrets and genetic codes that all lineages preserve, to reveal their shadows, wounds, and wonders, and it does so with a formal audacity and imaginative power that turn the reading into an absorbing experience. Nova Editorial Moll thus incorporates into its catalog an author who seems destined to occupy a prominent place among the new voices of current and future Catalan literature.

]]> <![CDATA[Risk passions]]> Underground is one of Jack Kerouac's most feverish and emotionally exposed works, a novel that turns the experience of love into a dizzying exploration of the limits of identity, desire, and self-destruction. Far from the itinerant, psychogeographic, and mythical dimension of On the Road, Kerouac here turns his gaze towards a more intimate and vulnerable universe, inspired by his complex relationship with Alene Lee, here transformed into the magnetic and unattainable figure of Mardou Fox, a stunning African American ten years his junior. The result is a text written with the intensity of an urgent confession, in which each sentence seems to chase the accelerated rhythm of thought and passion, and the emblematic author manages to capture the fragility of human bonds when they are caught between fascination, dependence, and the fear of loss.This dynamic narrative also highlights the fact that it describes the atmosphere of the more bohemian city of San Francisco in the early second half of the 20th century, when jazz was the soundtrack and symbol of a young generation that decided to live its own way, breaking conventions and rules. The beatnik revolt signified a brutal cultural insurrection, a radical refusal to accept the conformism, consumerism and spiritual impoverishment of post-war American society. Around figures like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, the typical ones, but also Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, and Lenore Kandel, the beat generation claimed a life lived with intensity, open to experience, displacement, sexual freedom, mysticism, and the exploration of the limits of consciousness. More than a literary movement, it was an invitation to exist in other ways, a poetic rebellion against mechanization that anticipated many of the great cultural transformations of the sixties and seventies. In its pages beats the conviction that literature can once again be a vital adventure, a search for truth, and a form of resistance.The translation by Joan Antoni Cerrato for Edicions Documenta Balear deserves a standing ovation because it transfers to Catalan the syncopated breathing, improvisational energy, and torrential musicality of Kerouac's prose without losing its power or naturalness. Thanks to his good work, whoever wants to read this raw work will be able to access it fully to be amazed by its radical honesty and nihilism. The Subterraneans is not just a self-portrait of the writer or his generation, nor a snapshot with words of a specific environment; it is an immersion into the gears of astonishment, an urban odyssey that shakes with the intensity of an open wound and confirms Jack Kerouac as one of the most powerful prose writers in the history of literature.

]]> <![CDATA[Rare earths]]> After eleven years of editorial silence – which in reality does not mean the poet has been quiet, as he himself makes clear in the magnificent prologue that serves as an introduction, since in reality all this time he has been brewing the event, waiting for the best moment and preparing for the explosion just like a good hunter – Emili Sánchez-Rubio publishes a new poetry book: Terres rares in the delightful collection La Fosca by Lleonard Muntaner, Editor. I want to say it right away: it is a colossal, visionary, prodigious work that confirms the author as one of the best of his generation. Therefore, we are faced with a return to the very top, an authentic renaissance, a resurgence that deserves all our attention and passion. Reading these pages illuminated by extreme wisdom, I have re-membered, returned things to the heart, according to the centennial Blai Bonet, how much the lyrical proposal of this prophet born in Ciutat de Mal in 1983 has always made me hallucinate, who has been a Necromancer and who now returns as an Alchemist or, even better, a Presocratic of the Future, an Oracular Scientist.Rare earths, as the title itself indicates, takes its name and atomic number from these elements that are very difficult to obtain and so poetic to, from their unfolding like a catalog of untamed matters in the style of Bartomeu Fiol, build the structure of the volume, which advances as we delve into the strange and precious fusion of entity and soul, of corpora and spirit. Recognizing chaos (in fact, the pages of this book are full of brutal oxymorons and paradoxes and contradictions) to unravel the cosmos, Emili Sánchez-Rubio shines in a verbal and philosophical way like Miquel Bauçà; as Andreu Vidal investigates the darkness to reach the conclusion that “in the Obscure, / all things are white”; he builds a foundational theory of Love following the example of the admired Robert Graves and secretes impossible images and real scenes, because in fact every poem is a legacy or a statement of incontinence, like the best disciple of the master and friend Emilio Arnao and achieves mystical genius that touches upon daily ardor and the epiphytic discovery of pure revelation: “The speed of light / is what it is / because it flees from Time.”Longer poems are combined with more synthetic poems in perfect balance, a brilliant cosmic balance that confirms the gifts of a brilliant and eloquent poet. The fascinating result, a pure fireball in the purest style of Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel of our era, is an admirable cosmogonic theory that returns poetry to its place as an exceptional vehicle of visionary knowledge and seals it through a messianic expression. ‘Terres rares’, by Emili Sánchez-Rubio, is, and I say this without doubts or regrets, a sublime book in every sense.

]]> <![CDATA[Ready for a grand journey?]]> Who dares to claim that Catalan literature is in decline? I can only see an increasingly ambitious, increasingly powerful creativity. In recent years, more voices, more styles, more generations have coexisted than ever before, as well as more proposals than in our entire history. Given this, I declare that it is evident that we do have State structures: publishing in Catalan, translation into Catalan, and literature in Catalan are undoubtedly so. Because there are books that contain, within themselves, countries and utopias. This is the sensation I have had reading recent epic epics that capture the essence of our chaotic and exciting world such as Cor pirinenc, by Lluís Calvo (Lleonard Muntaner, Editor, Jacint Verdaguer Prize); Arnau, by Adrià Targa (Editorial Proa, Critics' Prize), and El Periple, by Damià Rotger Miró (Galés Edicions, Mallorca Poetry Prize 2025).

]]> <![CDATA[Suck my autonomy]]> In the interviews that Mahmud Darwish gives in the beautiful volume La Palestina com a metàfora (Lleonard Muntaner, Editor), the Palestinian poet delves into crucial themes, such as the idea of permanent exile and the breakdown of History due to the fragility of the links of transmission –an idea that Lluís Calvo analyzes in the magnificent essay Els llegats (Arcàdia) – and also into the fact that the body has become the last bulwark, the last refuge, the definitive weapon with which to continue the fight in these times of chaos. I would dare to say that this is one of the keys to understanding the proliferation and exaltation of corporeal poetics and morbid poetry, essential trends in 21st-century Catalan poetry in a movement of forces that markedly opposes a recalcitrant neo-formalism that returns to meter and rhyme as foundations for verse writing. I thought of all this while reading, and enjoying, El cant de les cigales, the newest and most brutal title by the Llucmajor poet Cecília Navarro, a work more than worthy of the 43rd Manuel Rodríguez Martínez Ciutat d’Alcoi Poetry Prize.

]]> <![CDATA[Of truths there are many]]> A novel permeated by the breath of William Faulkner and the darkness of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. A novel constructed from the investigation of narratological mechanisms, full of perspectives and contradictions, in the manner of the prodigious Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. A novel with golden voices like those of the enigmatic and sick characters of Clarice Lispector. A novel that dialogues with international literature but is made in our land, and with beautiful winks to masters from here like Mercè Rodoreda and Jaume Cabré. A novel, indeed, that speaks tellurically of the territory, digging its fingers like roots into an extreme and fascinating land. A novel that seems like History because it has known how to use the gears of fiction, a precious lie, to reach raw human truths. A powerful, polyphonic, and wild novel. A novel that exists: Bèsties en el foc, by Joan Roure, published by La Magrana. This formidable work rises like a verbal cathedral of almost mystical intensity, a dark and incandescent song that originates from Ponent – a land that is not a backdrop, but rather energetically nourishes the author's imagination and imbues the work with a moral and symbolic density that dialogues with the rawness of the multiplied history that unfolds – to become a radical exploration of memory, guilt, and uncertainty. Through the voices of Mateu, Ramon, and Carme, the narrative unfolds like a choral architecture of devastating power where abused childhood becomes a witness and the word, a form of redemption. With a landscape of mists and silences that becomes almost another character, Joan Roure constructs a story of forbidden loves, hidden passions, and long-concealed confessions that, upon emerging, devastate everything. The novel is a burning immersion into the darkest corners of the human soul, where madness and lucidity touch, and where literature, in its most sublime gesture, becomes a form of poetic justice capable of illuminating what time had condemned to muteness. The themes it touches upon are most interesting: how wounded consciences add fuel to the bath of traumas that bog down spirits, various forms of emotional and physical survival in times of misery, political dissent, resistance networks, and the rough friction of opposing viewpoints not as a communicative impossibility but as an expression of the chaos that grounds us. For all these reasons, Bèsties de foc, by Joan Roure, is an admirable narrative artifact where truth is never univocal and the reader is invited to inhabit ambiguity, to read between the lines, and to enjoy the terrible and beautiful mysteries of the world and of life. Without a doubt, an essential book from now on.

]]> <![CDATA[I need wings to fly]]> With his first film (The 400 Blows), François Truffaut began a cinematic cycle starring a fictional character (Antoine Doinel, alter ego of Truffaut himself) who embodied different films, always played by the same actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud). From this filmed continuum, the beloved French filmmaker was able to explore the complex and exciting paths of a human being's life. I thought of this artistic example while reading Pere Joan Martorell's new and ambitious novel, Nits sense ales (Nights without wings) from Pagès Editors, as through its pages we can once again encounter a character who has starred in other works by the Lloseta writer, such as the Llibre de les revelacions (Book of Revelations) (Editorial Moll, 2007), because Amador is, in effect, Martorell's correspondent in possible parallel and quantum universes. In a literary adventure that connects him with Solenoide, by Mircea Cărtărescu, Pere Joan Martorell does not recreate his life in the mirror of fiction, but reinvents it from turning points that could have occurred, and thus recovers Amador, a psychologist and writer in a center dedicated to behavioral disorders. But every story begins with a turning point, that is, with a change, a disorder, and it is here when the appearance of Judith, a young woman marked by a past of brutal violence and abuse, activates a narrative mechanism of high emotional tension. Her voice, which emerges with difficulty between shame and urgency, challenges the therapist and destabilizes him to the point of forcing him to confront his own limits. It is then that the work unfolds like a progressive infernal descent towards the most opaque zones of the mind and society, with a highly symbolic language and images of powerful impact. The world that is drawn around the characters, with the presence of a sordid network of domination and exploitation, is not merely a setting that draws from a real case: it acts as an amplifier of internal conflicts. But what truly sustains the novel is its formidable ability to show how evils are not only external, but above all intimate, embedded in memory and the body. Martorell develops a story that skillfully moves through the margins of moral ambiguity, exploring the fine line that separates compassion from desire.With a ductile and intensely expressive prose, which knows how to alternate sharp cuts with moments of restorative delicacy, Nits sense ales, by Pere Joan Martorell, is a striking account of vulnerability and the search for redemption, a novel that delves without concessions into the most fragile and uncomfortable territories of human experience, where wound and desire are confused and where the need for empathy becomes almost a matter of survival.

]]> <![CDATA[The pillars of the Mediterranean]]> Last Easter Sunday, in a gesture that was both solemn and sly, very much in his provocative and vitalist way of being, one of the most important authors of Catalan literature bridging the 20th and 21st centuries died: Josep Piera. Heir to Ausiàs Marc, but also to Cavafis and Penna and Bufalino, he was one of the poets of the 70s generation who burst onto the scene with the most force: in the mythical Tafal collection –led by Andreu Vidal and Àngel Terron– he published one of his best titles, Drafts of Music. Over the years he also became a great narrator (Tale of the Return) and a referential prose writer with unforgettable essays, such as the one about his Neapolitan stay (A Beautiful Baroque Corpse), and diaries full of atavistic wisdom on par with the volumes of one of his masters, Josep Pla (especially noteworthy is the very brutal Whore of the Post-War).Josep Piera, collaborator of the photographer Toni Catany in the sensational work Visions de Tirant lo Blanc, was a poet not only because he had managed to write some of the most powerful verses in our history, but above all for his open attitude, perpetually vital despite personal and collective difficulties, and it was in this way that he managed that the saying “between being a poet and living there is a beautiful possibility that is living poetically” by his admired Joan Vinyoli – to whom he dedicated the precious book Vinyoliana– ended up being an existential banner. His intuition also helped him to understand, very early on, that the Catalan Countries are fortunate to be in a splendid corner: the heart of the Mediterranean. From this axis, he built a very coherent personal cosmogony steeped in tradition that sings this space of commerce, exchange, dialogue, creation, and passions. Broadening this thread, he dedicated part of his efforts to translating Andalusian poets (Trobadors amb turbant) and to navigating our sea and our landscapes. From this organic fervor, he offered us his latest book published a few months ago, Tot són ones from Editorial Afers, a collection of articles that read as if they were prose poems or fragments of a secret autobiography steeped in personal adventures and novelistic flair. Tot són ones is a choral ode in which Josep Piera sublimates his concept of Mediterranean. From beating squares to intimate landscapes charged with memory and desire, the book unfolds a psychogeographical cartography where each place is both origin and projection. The work thus becomes a conscious celebration of a shared civilization that not only recognizes the cultural and literary ties that have forged the author's voice, but reactivates them as a commitment, a will for belonging and continuity, a vital feast. Tot són ones is, indeed, the golden seal of a canonical trajectory that reaches its end. I already miss you, Pep.

]]> <![CDATA[The masks of virtue]]> For years I have been fascinated by the life and work of Iris Murdoch, one of the most extraordinary writers of the 20th century, and I am delighted to have become one of her most staunch defenders, as an exalter of her verbal prodigies but also as a translator of some of her best novels. That is why I am pleased that a selection of her essays is now reaching our language and our culture. Because, although there are books that invite us to think, the most important ones are those that invite us to rethink, that is, textual mechanisms that are actually machinery of words and thoughts that incite us to understand why we think as we think. Existentialists and Mystics. Writings on Philosophy and Literature, by Iris Murdoch, published by La Blanca at Edicions 62 with an excellent translation and clarifications by Maria-Arboç Terrades, clearly belongs to this happy category. We are faced with a compendium of writings that not only are founded on the pillars of philosophy and literature, but also question their limits and essences, and above all propose moral reflections of the utmost, strict, necessity. And this, in an increasingly immoral and sordid world – amidst vile wars in Iran and Ukraine and the appalling revelation of the declassified Epstein archives revealing a global network of prostitution, pedophilia, and satanic rituals –, is fundamental, I would even dare to say, a triumph. The volume, very well chosen and prefaced by the philosopher, writer, and editor Raül Garrigasait, allows access to an essayist Iris Murdoch who is, at the same time, traditional and singular, incisive and uncomfortable, illuminating and blinding, crystal clear and questioning, forceful and ironic. Although she appreciates Sartre's contributions, it is ultimately the decisive influence of Plato and the mystics that forms the basis of her system of ideas, a cosmos that constantly claims the moral dimension of art. It is also important to highlight the connections with Simone Weil's concept of alterity and empathy when Iris Murdoch argues that the best literature is a school of attention, a way of learning to see with more precision and less ego. Undoubtedly, one of the most stimulating elements ofExistentialists and Mystics is the balance between ethical rigor and aesthetic theory: Murdoch never completely separates these two spheres, and this makes the book a constellation of sparks that feed back into each other.Existentialists and Mystics, by Iris Murdoch, is a profoundly enriching, shamelessly exciting read, a brilliant edition that means the legacy of this brilliant author is reaching our shores as it deserves.

]]> <![CDATA['Trast', the bravest cry of Biel Mesquida]]> With Trast, fresh from the oven of the LaBreu Edicions factory on a twentieth anniversary that is achieving a lot of recognition, Biel Mesquida signs one of the most abundant and necessary books of his career, a poetic work that arrives at the right moment: after the well-deserved recognition of the Premi d’Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, but also in a sociological and political period of great global turbulence, with a disastrous return to far-right tendencies that should concern us much more. Trast is a manifesto, a fiery textual proposal that explodes in our faces to remind us that the voice of this pan-Catalan creator is fundamental because it builds foundations and, moreover, is in full catalytic combustion, in furious carnage. This new volume made of exalted verses is an explosion of lucid rage and vindicatory energy that grants no respite: a long and torrential poem fragmented into eight songs that arises from an almost physical urgency and unfolds just like a proud fountain that does not stop flowing, faithful to the propulsive impulse. Here, cruel beauty is not an escape but a sacred place from which demands for radical justice are raised, spoken with all names and all scars, both those of the body and those of the spirit. Biel Mesquida establishes a tense and vibrant dialogue with the maladjustments of History. Perceptive consciousness, always finely tuned, is traversed by the injustices that bleed, both inherited and current, as if the (in)civil war of '36 had not fully closed. In this sense, Trast is a polyphony of rebellion but also of revelation: the title itself condenses a devastating diagnosis of the present, of an island landscape turned into residue, of a massacred time in which territory, language, and custom seem to dissolve under the weight of material and symbolic perversions. And yet, far from any apocalyptic temptation, Mesquida's poetry does not resign itself; it dares to continue radiating linguistic powers that reactivate sensibilities and shake memories until they are once again incisive, critical, alive. In this quintessential volume there is a reckless density, a defined personality that refuses to be closed off, baring itself completely: each verse is written at the limit, with an intensity that invites reading with all senses open. In dialogue with major pieces of his work such as the poem 'Sgt. Pepper Wants You: Auca', the mosaic that is Trast resumes and multiplies the ability to converge epic and barbarism, culture and experience, collage and chant in a flow that is both tradition and postmodernity. The result is an extraordinary artifact that gallops between centuries and registers, and that confirms Biel Mesquida as an essential creator: a writer who writes and transforms language into a force capable of resisting, denouncing, and dreaming.

]]> <![CDATA[Exaltation of extinction]]> The publication of Bernhard's monumental novel Extinction The Catalan edition by Quid Pro Quo Edicions, with a magnificent translation by Clara Formosa Plans, is a literary event of the first order. Thomas Bernhard's most ambitious novel finally arrives in a Catalan edition capable of sustaining the extreme demands of its style: long, obsessive, circular sentences that function as a mechanism of thought rather than as simple narration, confirming that Bernhard was not only a master of the most contemplative narratologies. Zeitgeist epochal.

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