Enric Sòria (Oliva, 1958), has a degree in History and, at an early age, began to work as a journalist with the magazine El temps. Although he later started to work as a linguistic corrector with the Diputació de València (Provincial Council of Valencia), he never stopped writing for the press. In 1997 he moved to live in Barcelona, where he works as coordinator of the Opinion section of the newspaper Avui. He presently teaches Journalism at the Blanquerna Faculty of Communication of the Ramon Llull University. He has written for El Observador, La Vanguardia and Saó, and in a range of literary reviews including Daina, Caràcters and L'Espill. At present he is writing a weekly column in Avui and in the Valencia edition of El País, acting as a bridge between the cultural worlds of Valencia and Catalonia. Enric Sòria is a versatile writer and has felicitously played in different literary keys: poetry, first-person prose, different registers of the essay, and translation.

Enric Sòria's poetry is brief in dimension and long in intention. Mirall de miratges [Mirror of Mirages] (1981) and Varia et memorabilia (1984 and, in an expanded edition, 1988) - firm manifestations of a voice that knows what it aspires to - were surprising works because he challenged the empire of the rebellious, symbolist-rooted poetry of the '70s generation. Unbridled rhetoric, arbitrariness and absence of sense, as he notes in a diary, get on his nerves. Hence, a good distance from the oppressive and convoluted milieu of the hard core of the most representative poetic creators of the time, a vital and hedonistic air breezes through his poetry and, with his defence of the clarity of the classics, he expresses strict day-to-dayness and the reality of dreams. This song of youth, a machine of generating desires, clamours for uninhibited carnality, tenderness and joviality but also, like any other poetry of identity, it is also a seismography of the disquietude of anxieties, the thorns that prick in the passing of time, imposture and the fracturing of relationships. This is a youth that at times has raving dreams and the theatricality of the aesthete, waving the banner of vital and predatory promiscuity since, for the bright young things round here, irresolution, being all over the place and having impossible dreams were a way of making a living. In the end, our hero, to put it thus, begins to see clearly that, although he yearns for that "love as free as I was", living with the foot hard down on the accelerator is also disconcerting and one is obliged to learn the rules of duties. It dawns on him that limits not only frustrate but, depending on how one looks at them, can shield and stimulate one's attention into an eagerness to enjoy things. In Compàs d'espera [Waiting Rhythm] (1993) and L'instant etern [The Eternal Instant] (winner of the Carles Riba Prize 1998), with a voice that is growing in solidity and somewhat more severe in the latter, Sòria unravels his gaze starting out from the idea that time, while we make it, also makes us, and this is why it is right and proper to "love each thing purely as it happens" and to grasp the runaway instants in order to perceive the sense that is poured out among the words and actions, and to apprehend "the hidden form" that shapes man, "that we don't feel as alien and that endures in change". While in the first flush of youth he lived "as if every moment could be our last", in maturity, his sensibility rushes towards relishing the magic of the instant -and of things - and experiencing it "as a brief taste of eternity", which is surely a human stratagem for living life to the full. Thus, in one glorious poem, existence-justifying "talismans" are intoned in a beautiful melody. Next to the intensity of the moment hovers anxiety -frequently interrogatory - which makes of the poet a figure or shadow, in pursuit of another shadow that he never catches.

An omnivorous stance does not translate into a massive deployment of poems in the style of a poet that Enric Sòria loves, as is the case of Estellés but, rather, this is reticent, austere poetry, tending to strategic poems that illuminate the oceanic currents that circulate through the history it has been his lot to witness. Perhaps this why, as Sòria has stated many times, he is not interested in producing unitary collections of poems. Each poem is a landmark and has its own modulation. Whatever the case, he has also tried, in a little-known plaquette, Deu vinyetes per a un poeta valencià de preguerra [Ten Vignettes for a Pre-war Valencian Poet] 1993), to produce a certain conception of a whole, with the aim of integrating the local gaze with European inquietudes.

Enric Sòria upholds and writes comprehensible, accessible poetry - which does not mean simple or facile - to speak of complex matters. Well-versed in the ambiguities of language, he understands that between the mirror of the real poem and the mirror of the desired poem there is always a fissure to be taken into account and, in order to bridge it, he seeks precision, the word dense with meaning, loaded with depth and literary resonances. For this very reason, his voice, in this interplay of reflections and perspectives, oscillates between glimmers of brevity and discursiveness, irony and reflection, personal identity and collective identity, the allegory poem and the "in-the-style-of" poem. In the traffic of literary transactions, Sòria shows his cards and one sees how Kavafis, Borges, Cernuda, Brines and Estellés, have been enormously stimulating for him, but never smothering because it is he who has eventually written the words and the music.

Enric Sòria is much more than a poet. He is a man of letters, an essayist of notable authority with a growing commitment to the tumultuous art of public opinion thanks to his articles in the press - which are later collected in books - and diaries. His writings were quick to be appreciated for the clarity of his judgement, his passionate style and his evident and rotund sense of responsibility. His dynamic curiosity and the analytic play in the unfolding of his articles are well-served by his abundant and firmly-based knowledge and a fine-tuned sensibility. His weakness has always been literature and art in general, but the array of his themes has been expanding as his writing has become increasingly attuned to the pace of today's events.

Enric Sòria's intellectual temperament tends to the classical. He is a citizen and sets his gymnastically agile, argumentative intelligence to work in the service of critical reflection about matters that mark the present. Having just criticised certain performances in the political sphere and then connecting them with others comes very close to politics, although his is a standpoint that differs from that of professional politicians. And what is of value here is his responsibility and involvement in things with which he is concerned. His personality, taking everything into account, is in some regards unlike that of a writer like Joan Fuster or Joan Francesc Mira, because theoretical engagement with the identity or the political orientation of the País Valencià (Land of Valencia) does not figure among his priorities. It seems that the heavier components of nationalist fever repel him. Yet, there is no doubt that the situation of Valencia affects him and, when necessary, he has spoken out, especially in denouncing the stupidities of the Administration with regard to Catalan and its teaching as a living language and a language of culture.

Mentre parlem: Fragment d'un dietari iniciàtic [While We Speak: Fragment of an Initiatory Diary] and La lentitud del mar: Dietari, 1989-1996 [The Lentitude of the Sea] (winner of the Carles Rahola Prize 2003), two titles of reference among his memoir writing, witness the ongoing shaping of a writer who strives to express himself, understand himself and understand the world while registering the tangle of links between thought and life. Thought, there is in abundance; life, not so much but there will be a little more of it in the forthcoming volume. Again, the surprise -and fascination- of fleeting experiences make an appearance here and there. Both books are essentially the setting for the mental combat in which he is engaged in different areas in order "to be and to know". It is a constant tug-of-war between arguments and counter-arguments, nuances and more nuances, general reflection and the specific item, in order to come to a kind of inner judicial decision. The brain, Sòria goes so far as to say, interiorises the public square. There is, as a result, little space for repose, for harmony. This means, moreover, that he is really affected by the problems of the world, experiencing them full-on. The second volume is more demanding and its moral concern becomes its hub. He writes of such slippery matters as truth and error, justice and impartiality, racism, determinism. In the never-ending debate between universalism and localism, Sòria speaks for a sort of universal ethics, which is quite different from universal life.

In the titanic - or almost - adventure of writing personal pages, and also the articles that Sòria has written with a view to weaving plausible although provisional answers, key roles are played, on the one hand by the rigour exemplified in his quest for truth, precision and convincing arguments and, on the other, by the honesty and authenticity that oblige him to doubt, to engage in self-criticism and constantly to hone his views. These two aspects of his work come to take on their own value in the course of his diaries and to fulfil the additional function of giving the author security and credibility with his readers. Enric Sòria's memoir writing - or literature of memory, as people tend to say nowadays - is a construction, but much more than a staging, of memory because of his personal involvement and the depth of his thinking.

Sòria states that the ego is plural, but living a life worthy of being lived requires keeping the inner chorus on a short leash in order to obtain minimal stability because life is fragile and it is our lot to struggle amidst certainty and confusion, between things that are solid and things that melt into air, as the title of a famous book once said.

The diaries are all this but they are also a huge quarry - written in powerful prose - that one can mine for ideas, readings, suggestions, aphorisms, journeys and portraits, and even more. Of this voracity that revels in culture and news, there is already a good sample in the books of essays in which Sòria brings together a summary of his loves and substantial literary issues, for example realism and the historical novel (Incitacions [Incitations] and L'espill de Janus [The Mirror of Janus], the latter containing articles that are really of a very high standard), in Sermonari laic [A Layman's Book of Sermons] (1994) and in Cartes de prop [Letters from Nearby] (2006) - a collection of pieces on Valencia with Valencian readers in mind - where he addresses general and present-day matters, generously and in a well-balanced fashion, steering clear of contentious issues, in a text studded with the surprises that the culture has to offer him.

Copyright text © 2008 Francesc Calafat