<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - literature]]> 10 <![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["In poetry, humor is frightening to include; it can seem like you're trivializing what you write"]]>

Llucia Serra Ferre (Eivissa, 1992) has just won the Ciutat de Manacor poetry prize with Et dibuix un portal in media something (i tu t’hi ajoques). Living in Mallorca since her adolescence, she is a philologist, a high school teacher in Son Servera, and runs a board game publishing company in Catalan, Dino Ludens. So that the reader can get an idea of her writing, in Et dibuix un portal..., she quotes and paraphrases a poem by Antonina Canyelles that says: “You can say my boat, but the sails are always the wind’s”. Llucia Serra’s version is as follows: “You can say my house / but the lands / are always the bank’s”. The poem is titled ‘Idealista’.

]]> <![CDATA[Toni Planissi: "It's a story of characters so concerned with building their truth, that they end up forgetting it"]]>

Toni Planissi (Manacor, 1973) is a discreet man and an extraordinary author. A modesty that quickly dissolves when one begins to leaf through the pages of his new graphic novel Todas las mentiras conducen a la verdad, the story of two worlds confronting each other to defend a reality that each one believes to be their own and unshakeable. An ironic critique of politics, religion, and the foundations of agreed-upon truths, but often sustained by lies.

]]> <![CDATA["The violence that any desire entails is uncomfortable"]]>

The Majorcan poet Marcos Augusto debuts as a novelist with Te hice dios (Random House), a work that explores desire, illness, guilt, and moral limits through a story that is as uncomfortable as it is ambitious. Two men meet in a chat looking for sex, but the encounter goes further: one wants to infect himself with HIV —he is one of the so-called bug chasers— and the other promises him that he will. It is the starting point of a relationship marked by destructive impulses, lies, and the need to love and give meaning to loss. We talk to the author about literature, love, and the limits of fiction.

]]> <![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["Traditional cuisine has been relegated to special occasions, it is no longer in the day-to-day"]]>

There are cuisines that not only nourish, but also explain who we are: those that are passed down in silence, from generation to generation, and that live in memory before recipe books. From this invisible thread starts A kitchen in every home, the book by Pau Gómez Calvo, which combines memories, recipes, and reflection to reclaim a domestic legacy that, according to the author, is undergoing a complete transformation.

]]> <![CDATA[Of this I also want to speak]]> I am glad that recent times have been benign, even happy with well-deserved awards such as the XXVI Jaume Fuster prize awarded by the Association of Writers in the Catalan Language, for Dolors Miquel, an essential author without whom the ends of the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st century of Catalan literature cannot be understood, and now she proves it to us again with one of the most impressive books, without a doubt, that will be released this year: The sleeping breast,, at Edicions 62, with a beautiful cover by Miquel Barceló.In her more than remarkable career, Dolors Miquel has written mainly poetry, but she has also provided us with excellent examples of prose and theatre. Well, El pit adormit combines these and all textual possibilities and more: it has the breathtaking force of a colossal epic poem, it makes us advance through different plots and subplots like a great Catalan novel, it enjoys the resounding expression of a monologue that unfolds in furious bursts, it is read with the most electric eagerness of the best diaries, and whoever touches this does not touch a book – as Walt Whitman said, although Emily Dickinson could have said it without any problem – but touches a human being who has consecrated their life to Beauty in capital letters because Beauty has generated deep wounds and supreme passions in them, and for this reason they have no other motive than to create, to create with letters through an often ruthless power. I will continue pulling this thread of thought: there are books that are written, yes, but then there are others that impose themselves, that impose themselves on us, and I would dare to affirm that Dolors Miquel is one of those creators who finds herself imposed upon by the torrent that floods her, and in this case the tsunami has presented itself to her, at a decisive vital moment, in the form of memories, images, scenes, stories, little battles, suggestions, reflections, connections, and associations that end up taking the form of paragraphs in a resounding victory of the fragment, the note, the jotting, the flash, the sudden insight. The style may remind us of Lluís Maicas, but the style is pure Dolors Miquel in a reformulation we had never read from her before, and we already know that she has lived many lives and has been many Dolors Miquels and also Lola Miquel, but the Dolors Miquel of today has reached a peak, a milestone, a great book. The sleeping breast, by this new Dolors Miquel, is a striking vital testimony in a medical crisis that often leads to the abyss, a delicious album of snapshots that move us, an authentic philosophical treatise, a series of strong blows, an individual and collective memory of decisive changes in Catalan poetry, a masterpiece by a total writer in a state of grace

]]> <![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[I weave and the spider dances]]>

At all times it is relevant to read a praise of literature like the one Santiago Alba Rico makes in the pages of his latest book. He draws maps for us to travel to different “literary countries”, but he does not do so as a literary critic, but as a storyteller. It is the wonder of literature, books allow us to retell their stories again and again, sometimes faithfully, sometimes with betrayal. In fact, not ceasing to talk about books, including those written a long time ago, is what makes them continue to address us. Alba Rico puts six pairs of authors in dialogue, creating a kind of genealogy of his sensitivity as a reader. Kafka and Potter, Melville and Hergé, Dickens and Cervantes, Dostoevsky and Hašek, Shelley and McCullers, Austen and Proust. We have a book of books in our hands.

]]> <![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[Ricard Ruiz Garzón wins the Guillem Cifre de Colonya prize]]>

The Barcelona writer Ricard Ruiz Garzón has been proclaimed winner of the XLV Guillem Cifre de Colonya Children's and Youth Narrative Award 2026 for the work Trenta pares vaig tenir (i encara me'n queden dos), a novel aimed at readers between 8 and 14 years old that combines humor, fantasy, and reflection on the family.

]]> <![CDATA[Automatic literature]]> Following a recent case of plagiarism of an article in the Catalan sphere, which the forger attributed to a mishap caused by AI, and a rather important Anglo-Saxon literary prize, which an author allegedly won also using AI, there has been renewed discussion in the world of literary creativity about what we will do from now on with texts that wish to circulate in the world, the authorship of which may be questioned by virtue of their possible algorithmic origin. For someone to use AI to write a literary piece can only be due to reasons related to their shortcomings as an intellectual or as a writer. For a true author, using AI to write would be like using skates to play football, when precisely the grace of the game is running. For me, having the machine write for me is equivalent to having a machine make love for me, or sending a robot to bed with the lover, simply because I'm lazy or I fear that this way I will look better in front of my beloved. It makes no sense to entrust a machine to do what gives us pleasure and lucidity, what makes us feel alive and intelligent. Furthermore, I doubt that any machine can currently write with the accuracy that good writers continue to have, but even if that point were reached in the near future, what the bot might tell us would also be of no interest, since it is literally no one and what ends up being interesting about literature and journalism is what a flesh-and-blood person thinks—or feels or sees—about it. A machine cannot tell me what I think about things, because it does not know. Thanks to AI, we might end up simulating an erudition that we do not have, or pretending to have read books we have not actually read, but that would not be a new imposture either. Cheaters are older than the printing press in this trade, and it was precisely the printing press that democratized writing and knowledge. AI is nothing more than a kind of automatic printing press, which produces text at the consumer's whim, which is not what writers end up doing; the role of intellectuals is precisely to remind us of what we do not want to remember, or to make us think about things that can give us a headache. When I see an AI questioning the fundamental ideas of the tribe, I will begin to get scared, but for the moment it is only the voice of the master, because we should not forget that all AI is nothing more than a form of business for those who give it a push. “We were clever enough to invent AI, and foolish enough to need it, and stupid enough that we can't figure out if we did the right thing…”; this was said by none other than the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a recent interview. And we can think about whether he's right or not without AI. I, for one, still prefer to keep reading people who make mistakes, who doubt, who obsess, and even who self-destruct while writing, rather than a machine that simply calculates which sentence fits best with the preceding ones. Literature is not just text production: it is vanity, it is contradiction, it is a human consciousness trying to understand itself. And this, for better or for worse, cannot yet be automated. 

]]> <![CDATA["On a stage, it is impossible to die better than Isolde"]]>

This Wednesday, June 3, and as part of the Palma Book Fair, in Plaça d’Espanya, Pere Estelrich i Massutí will present his collection of articles with a common denominator and a sufficiently eloquent title: Wagnerian Chronicles, published by Edicions Documenta Balear within the Menjavents collection. Estelrich needs no introduction. He is known on his own merits. A mathematician, he writes, disseminates and spreads wisdom everywhere: in newspapers, on the radio, wherever his knowledge is required. He writes as he speaks, clearly and entertainingly, as only someone who carries a wealth of many years and no little work, done with passion, which his words undoubtedly convey, can do.

]]> <![CDATA[Protest speech of Fades at the Palma Book Fair: "Culture is not protected as a right"]]>

The Mallorcan urban music group Fades inaugurated this Friday the 44th edition of the Palma Book Fair with a markedly vindictive opening speech in defense of the Catalan language, local culture, and the role of young creators. The trio, formed by Àngel Exojo, Ferran Pi, and Vicenç Calafell, took advantage of the inaugural event to demand more institutional support for culture made in Catalan and to denounce policies that, in their opinion, contribute to weakening its public presence.

]]> <![CDATA[The gifted intelligence of flowers]]> “Humanity, almost all of it, has lost its natural value” is one of the many and valuable sentences that conceptually flood, and with all the reason and urgency in the world, Laia Malo’s newly released and exceptional poetry collection: Rum-rum in the prestigious Jardins de Samarcanda collection of the Cafè Central label. I say it is exceptional because it truly is: the author takes a brutal leap forward in her career and gives us her best book, a volume sedimented and nourished by each and every one of the poet's multiple tasks, since in addition to being a translator from English and Russian, Malo also translates other languages of the globe, especially those of the fascinating universes of insects, so that we may understand and grasp other realities beyond the surfaces of things. Alongside necessary denunciations like those already mentioned, there is, at the same time and at every happy moment, a firm sentiment of hope: the unrenounceable illusion that a change is still possible that leads to a new global consciousness of an essential return to the natural environment. In fact, the poet, more ambitious than ever, invites a re-foundation of all Culture in the face of Nature: “In the beginning was the Green.” And no, it is not just a dazzling verbal finding, it is the renewing spirit of a magnificent book built from prodigious political biopoems, not the first in Catalan literature but undoubtedly the best so far.We had already been able to hear and read just complaints like these thanks to the expanded work of Laia Malo with her expanded writings: as a member of the increasingly recognized electroverse duo Jansky and as the person responsible for very well-crafted periodic articles in ARA Balears. But it is true that it is the first time that these other literary formats nourish her verses and her poems. The result is a book of colossal dynamism, both structural and mental. With Rum-rum we witness a transformation as huge as the one that Blai Bonet brought about when he left behind the models of the Escola Mallorquina, and it is that Laia Malo takes a leap and surpasses the current paradigms of representing in words the biological environments that surround us, since they are not scenarios, they are not wild spaces that escape our absurd civilizing desire, they are complete macrocosms that we do not take into account enough, and this is our tragedy, our uprooting. Rum-rum is a novel, wildly vital song, a new gospel that sings of the gifted intelligence of flowers and blossoms with tongues of exuberant, super-fertile libido.Rum-rum, by Laia Malo, does not reproduce the music of the spheres, it captures the rhythms and melodies of the planet and posits itself as a proof of faith that drives us to believe that people still have time to become human beings again.

]]> <![CDATA[New scholarship for writers: 500 euros, 10 days in a hotel in Magaluf and literary residency]]>

The Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival (FLEM) has announced the first literary residency in the town, a program offering two ten-day creation grants for writers working in Catalan and English. The residences will take place at the Innside Calvià Beach hotel and include accommodation, travel, an economic endowment of 500 euros, and participation in the next edition of the festival. The deadline for submitting applications will be open until June 15, and applications must be sent through the form available on the event's website.the event's website.

]]> <![CDATA[The Jaume Santandreu Foundation is born, which will have its headquarters in the Barracar neighborhood of Manacor]]>

The social and literary legacy of Jaume Santandreu i Sureda takes shape with the creation of the Foundation that bears his name. An entity that will be based in Manacor, in the Barracar neighborhood, and that is conceived and committed to preserving and disseminating both Santandreu's work in the field of social exclusion in Mallorca (with the aim of continuing the legacy started at Can Gazà) and his literary legacy.

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