What Damià Rotger was like, according to his friend: "She was a 'strange grandparent' with a world of her own inside."

PalmSometimes it takes a while to understand who we are, who we are. Some people, perhaps even unknowingly, act as a beacon in the midst of a dark adolescence. They are messengers, helpers, or teachers. However, there must be an alert receiver on the other end. In today's case, both the sender and the receiver are two people with an extremely powerful gift: that of writing. One knew what to say, and the other knew how to listen. The writer and poet Ponç Pons tells us about the adolescent typographer and poet Damià Rotger was.

Born in 1981 in Ferreries, Damià was a blond, pale-haired boy. The son of Sebastià Rotger, "a journalist who worked as a printer," according to Ponç, and Paquita Miró. Regarding his mother, who died in 2021, Ponç recalls a confession from Damià himself: "If it hadn't been for her, I would never have managed to redirect my potential, both professionally and in the poetic field." In this poetic field, he adds, "he has already achieved his own voice and has a splendid future to experience."

Ponç met him at the Alaior secondary school in the 1990s. She describes him as "a hippie teenager with long hair who searched for himself in the Menorcan classrooms, with a frank and clear gaze, touched by a spiral of youthful vibration." He enhanced the rock aesthetic of his hair with T-shirts of his favorite bands: Pink Floyd, The Doors (his mother's favorite band, Ponce specifies), King Crimson, Yes, Jethro Tull, Camel, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, among others. The teacher, Ponç Pons, believes that "you could see a rare elderly in that academic environment of abstract knowledge and memorization exams." In his opinion, Damià exuded "affection and passion," a "contagious passion for life and art that could not find its outlet."

Ponç recounts that when he met with Sebastià Rotger, the latter expressed his concern about Damià's turbulent adolescence. "I encouraged him not to lose faith in the innate virtues of his rocker son, and I remember making a comparison that wasn't very poetic, but it came from the heart," the poet says. He continues: "Look, Sebastià!" (I said). Damià is a good, powerful car that goes at fifty. He's a little lost because he's looking for his way and can't find it, but when he finds it, he'll go miles an hour and will bring you much joy because, in addition to being smart and lively, he's a good boy." "May God hear you, Ponce!" said Sebastián. And that was when Ponç Pons's magic hand intervened.

At Alaior High School, where Pons was a teacher and Rotger was a student (although they never met in the classroom), the teacher made it convenient for him to meet the hippie rocker in the playground and learn about his interests, and "in a discreet and pedagogical way." In that initiatory friendship, Ponç gave him a Genesis cassette (led by Peter Gabriel) and one by Creedence Clearwater Revival. "His internal contradiction was that he liked coming to school because he found the warmth of his classmates, but he had his boss, his restless spirit, focused on non-school subjects," he notes.

Discovering the world of typography changed his life: "He found the path and, amidst the familiar noise of the printing machines that set the music to his childhood, he has become one of the most renowned typographers in Europe," Ponç celebrates: "And although I don't know if he found the one that that boy rare elderly He had a world of his own inside. I'm sure that when he wrote his first poem, he finally felt who he was, what he was looking for, what he wanted. Because, the look doesn't deceive, and when I spoke to him in the courtyard, his sparkling eyes seemed, boisterous, like those of a Menorcan Rimbaud.