Who I Am and Why I Write

Francesc Parcerisas' poetry is mainly collected in the volume Triomf del present (Triumph of the Present: Poems (1965-1983)), which represents one of the most wide-ranging and yet consistent contributions of his generation to the panorama of contemporary Catalan literature. His poetry, with its clear affinities with the Anglo-Saxon tradition, started out as being linked with the realism that was dominant in a good part of the poetic scene of the 1960s, for example Vint poemes civils (Twenty Civil Poems) and Homes que es banyen (Men Bathing). Later, after testing the experimentalism of the 1970s with the work Latitud dels cavalls (Latitudes of Horses), he would start writing a more intimate kind of poetry with sober echoes of the classics and revealing deep moral concerns.

I am a product of the 1940s middle-class bourgeoisie in Catalonia, with the bitter contradictions that entails and the subtle richness that tends to go hand in hand with the contradictions. I was born in Begues, a small town in the coastal range but I consider that my education is urban, if Barcelona at the end of the 1940s with flocks of sheep blocking the tramlines, rubbish carts and the smell of boiled cabbage was really a city in the sense we give the word nowadays.

Country and city were connected and blended together despite the toll-houses, in an interaction that is very different from what we have at present, and having gone from home to school catching lizards or breaking up processions of bilious green caterpillars in the environs of the fence of the monastery garden -a monastery full of cloistered monks who, at the midday mass on Sundays, sang spectrally from behind operatically dramatic bars- does not prevent me from mythologizing in equal parts my memories of nature and my bedazzlement before the enormous multihued cardboard toys hanging from the columns and ceilings of the city's only department stores, or the enchantment produced by the penetrating smell of burning wax -not oil- of the silver-plated racing cars that trained for the Penya Rhin race, stridently and speedily crossing in front of the esplanade with the fountain where we went for the Ash Wednesday ceremony of burying the sardine.

We were "city folk" when we went to the country, but our city was still half rural, and more so, I think now, than most present-day medium-sized towns. We had chickens on the roof terrace, killed rabbits with a blow from the mortar to the back of the neck and spread the skins out to dry in the sun; crickets and glow-worms were put into a little cage constructed ad hoc, and all of that mingled with the first discoveries of, and changes in the world -of the remote world and the close-to-hand one- changes that brought into being, with blatant delay, the shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

At times it still surprises me that someone can evoke periods or events without being worried about the exactness of the memory, the exactness of the context in which memory moves, and I am even more flummoxed when somebody believes that looking back to the past is pure nostalgia. Discussion then becomes difficult for me because I feel we are not talking about the same matter and that my hypothetical interlocutor has not understood a single thing. The same thing happens to me when, if we are talking about love and passion, somebody thinks we are making some kind of witless list of occasional adventures that are -and were- perforce trivial matters, and not analysing the stages of our essential shaping as human beings.

When all is said and done, these two components of memory and passion constitute, as I understand it, one of the mainstays of life -and evidently of literature. I leapt from reading Jules Verne in the Cadete Collection to reading Muñoz Pabón in the school library, Pío Baroja in the Caro Raggio editions and Hemingway in the maladroit Spanish editions. And, only a few years later, but now considerably shaken up, I was reading Sartre, Malraux and the nouveau roman in the Livre de Poche or 10/18 editions. Of all these books what I remember is a "climate" that still endures and this atmosphere is certainly the setting for my passion for books: for reading, for writers, for the very objects that books are because, as an excellent poet from León has remarked, books are "among those places where life is safe from the successive smash-ups".

Even now, rediscovering the volume of Precisamente así -the title given to the Spanish translation of Kipling's Just So Stories by Marià Manent- is always an occasion of pleasure and of reaffirmation of adult life because this book was a wonderful magic lantern from which issued a gigantic, unpredictable and mysterious genie reeling off stories that made one live many lives. Now, holding this book in my hands, I am reconstructing the memories of someone who is not exactly me but who has been my germinal seed. The universe as I know it and the universe that I have made for myself are somehow in nuce there in the distant voices of my parents whom I hear reading the heroic deeds of the intrepid sailor Mister Henry Albert Bivvens. And this feeling has endured in a wide range of different texts: Kierkegaard, Anouilh, Casona, and García Lorca are inseparable from the white-covered Argentine editions, produced in what seemed to be blotting paper, from the adolescent who, capricious and full of himself, once revelled in them. And the orange or greenish tint of the thick paper of the French paperback editions is inseparable from a particular smell and certain concepts: without those editions, La Nausée wouldn't have been the same, just as Bonjour tristesse had, perforce, to have a visual female lead who was none other than Jean Seberg.

In this regard, I had the good luck to discover, in the library at home and under the rough, dusty and yellowed paper of some pre-war Catalan editions, fruits that seemed vaguely deliquescent, whether it was Longus' Daphnis and Chloe or the nebulous and hygienic eroticism of the stories of Pierre Louys. At the very least, however, these books demonstrated the existence of a tradition that was not entirely impossible.

Pondering this a little more, I would say that one of the great virtues of the imaginative world that the books were opening up was that they made it possible to construct a hideaway. By this, I do not mean the hideaway of a cowardly or miserly retreat from life: life was very rich and caressable and, as one changed with life, it was worth doing much more, even abandoning forevermore books and all kinds of literature, perhaps. But, fortunately, the dilemma didn't work like that at all and the shelter that books offered was immediate, intimate and, where necessary, concealable. It thus came about that, in order to dwell in that powerful and fantastic secret of literature, one only had to "make" books: write them, scribble them, cobble them together, construct them, publish them ? Even now I don't trust those writers who have never been tempted to "make" books. In fact, this is how one begins to write: in single handwritten copies, in runs of two with carbon paper in the typewriter, producing objects that enable us, as authors, to take some distance and to see how the texts get on with it, independent, incriminating, stimulating, eternal.

In doing thus we engage in an act of creation and of shamelessness that brings us close to the small gods of ancient mythologies who dreamed, constructed and fixed things in their little universes. And it is precisely in this dazzling and distant mirror that the writer -god amongst gods- controls where we readers find the images that enable us to bear better our other more magic condition, that of men amongst men. This would seem no small thing.

Francesc Parcerisas

Copyright text © 1994 Francesc Parcerisas/ILC

On the Writer ...

The truth is that, from beneath a poetry of combat, there began to appear a civic formulation that was very often the only way to include a bashfully lyrical note. I believe that I can say this without immodesty because the titles of my early books - Vint poemes civils (Twenty Civil Poems - 1967), Homes que es banyen (Men Bathing - 1970) and Discurs sobre les matèries terrestre (Discourse on Terrestrial Matter - 1971) -seem to say it quite eloquently. I would say that, starting out from that milieu, the young poets that had embarked upon a very typical personal journey with more readings of politics than poetry began to note some kind of compensation of the imbalance after the personal disillusionment, the trips abroad and exploration of those winds of fraternal and idealistic liberty that were blowing at the end of the sixties (Che, May '68, Dylan, the Beatles ?). The few who kept writing did so frequently giving primacy to personal experience, with a critical view of the country and essentially concerned to find stable moral values. This ethical-civic-political process has been, and still is, a phenomenon of internalisation and analysis: hence the abundant writing aiming to reflect personal relationships and basically the erotic one. We therefore have titles such as Papers privats (Private Papers) by Narcís Comadira, Vida privada (Private Life) by Marta Pessarrodona, Marees del desig (Tides of Desire) by Salvador Oliva and Ideari a la recerca de la fruita tendra (Ideology in Search of Tender Fruit) by Josep Elias.

F. Parcerisas, "A l'entorn de la jove poesia al Principat" (About Young Poetry in the Principality), Serra d'Or, XXI, pp. 269-272 (1979)

L'edat d'or (The Golden Age - 1983) represents an abandonment of experimentalism and a reencounter with his basic voice, the voice that furnished his lyrical discourse induced by his gaining in experience: existential and literary. This book contains some of Parcerisas' most remarkable poems, good examples of the poetry of exposition of moral life. Conditioned by three constants, reading and translations, the evocation of love, and evidence of the passing of stages, with L'edat d'or the poet seems to have found a -the- definitive voice. The poems exude a treasure: wisdom.

Enric Bou, "Mirada i compromís. La poesia de Francesc Parcerisas" ("Gaze and Commitment. The Poetry of Francesc Parcerisas") (ILC, 1994)