The writer and lawyer Lluís Ferran de Pol died on 19 October. We are thus bereft of an excellent narrator and a crusading soldier for Catalonia and the Catalan-language territories. He was born in Arenys de Mar in 1911, was a literary autodidact and, at an early age, began to write for local magazines and newspapers, a journalistic undertaking that he was never to abandon. He wrote for the Arenys de Mar publications Oreig (1932) –which was directed by his friend Josep M. Miquel i Vergés– and Salobre (1935), mainly reviews, prose pieces and a few translations. He established a small cultural and literary group with the artist and bibliophile Francesc Arnau and the sculptor Joan Barrera, who introduced him into the world of art, an apprenticeship that would be very useful for his later work in Mexico. His first published story was "Els hereus de Xanta" (Xanta’s Heirs, 1934), which was awarded the Joan Colom Prize for Fiction at the Tenth Jocs Florals of the Arenys de Mar Athenaeum, a literary competition presided over by Joaquim Ruyra and Carles Riba.

He graduated in Law and, while he was studying for a public-sector examination with a view to becoming a notary, the Civil War broke out in 1936. He was an instructor of the people’s army of the Republic and was sent to the Aragon Front to join the Republican army. He fought on several different fronts, including the Battle of the Ebro, where he was wounded. However, he never forsook literature and his story Tríptic (el sàtir-el frare-la donzella) (Triptych (The Satyr-The Monk-The Maiden)) won the Narcís Oller Prize of the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia for the best story written in Catalan in 1937. Like other prose pieces of his early writings, it was not published until 1964. In these early works one sees the stylistic bases of the good fiction writer he later became, together with his use of the myth. In 1938 his translation of E. T. A. Hoffman’s Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot) appeared with the title L'olla d'or while, at the same time, he was making notes for a study of Catalan chivalrous literature. From his early youth he was a passionate, deeply-admiring reader of the Catalan classics which, along with the Bible, he kept re-reading.

The Mexican Period
When the Civil War ended he was interned for six months in the concentration camp of Saint-Cyprien in Roussillon. Thanks to the good offices of the British Committee for Refugees from Spain, he was able to go to Mexico where he lived for ten years. No sooner had he arrived than, thanks to the generous spirit of the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, he was able to start writing for the newspaper El Nacional where, in the years 1939 and 1940, he published a series of articles about the end of the Civil War and his internment in the concentration camp. He worked as a journalist for eight years, writing about literature, art –and was also director of a monographic page on art– and culture on a weekly basis. It is particularly interesting to read his articles and reviews concerning the pre-Columbian cultures which had such a great influence in his work. His pieces for El Nacional shaped his expository style. They are informative articles, didactic in their clarity, and they contributed towards the cultural transformation that Mexico was undergoing in the decade of the 1940s. For Ferran de Pol, journalism –and he said this on more than one occasion– was a permanent school of writing, even when it was in the Spanish language.

While he was working as a journalist and studying for an Arts degree, Ferran de Pol was also one of the founders of two Catalan-American reviews: Full Català and Quaderns de l'Exili. The former appeared in 1941 with Josep Carner as its director. Its contents were fundamentally cultural, although when Joan Sales joined the staff they shifted more into the realms of political and national reflection. Ideological and personal differences saw the publication’s demise the following year. Nevertheless, the seed of a new publication was planted. Quaderns de l'Exili (1943-1947), a group review with Joan Sales among its founders, would soon become one of most active and significant publications of this ilk. In a six-point programme, it upheld the national unity of the Catalan-language territories; the possible intervention of a Catalan combat unit in the Second World War to fight against European fascism; and the consideration of nationalism as a sense of equality among all compatriots. The magazine contributed new ideas, perhaps the most innovative among the exiles, on the “National Disaster of 1939”, the role of intellectuals and Catalan culture. This publication or, better said, the reflections of the group, profoundly marked Ferran de Pol’s thinking and he was to remain faithful to these ideas over the years.

In 1946 he obtained an Arts degree from the University of Mexico and, in 1948, was awarded a “Maestro en Letras” (Master of Arts) degree with the publication of Notas para un estudio de Àngel Guimerà (Notes for a Study of Àngel Guimerà), which offers a new reading of the playwright’s speeches and poetry. Ferran de Pol was interested in the man and writer who expressed his views in public on such issues as politics, Catalan nationalism and social and religious affairs, inter alia.

Moreover, Ferran de Pol, like other exiles, was engaged in a whole range of writing-centred endeavours. He published –with other writers– a brief history of the Second World War (1944), a tourist guide to Cuernavaca (1948) and also wrote entries on a number of Catalan writers for the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (1947), besides contributing reviews and articles for the Revista de Filosofía y Letras of the University of Mexico. He also translated into Spanish works by Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert and others.

As a whole, the Mexican stage of his life was nothing less than a consummate step towards literary and personal maturity. Ferran de Pol was deeply marked by Mexico. As a writer, he acquired a series of thematic, stylistic and cultural traits of the Central American country, as may be seen in two novels, a collection of short stories, a play –unpublished– and several essays. In this period of his life he also met Esyllt T. Lawrence a Welsh philologist with whom he studied when he was completing his Arts degree, who wrote for El Nacional and Quaderns de l'Exili, and whom he would subsequently marry.


Return to Catalonia: The Creation of an Intense Narrative Opus
Ferran de Pol returned to Catalonia towards the end of 1948 and, as of 1949 he worked as a lawyer in Arenys de Mar and Arenys de Munt until his retirement in 1988. In 1950, for the first time since his years in exile, he published again, in this case the story "Boisard" in Joan Triadú’s Antologia de contistes catalans (1850-1950) (Anthology of Catalan Short Story Writers (1850–1950). This story predates the war but his narrative mastery is already evident, giving a glimpse of subsequent thematic and stylistic features of his work. However, it also marks the end of a stage. He wrote the greater part of his fictional work in the 1950s with Mexico as its mainstay. Ferran de Pol repeatedly refers to it in his attempts to describe –from different perspectives– the human and cultural upheaval that the Central American country represented in his life. Hence, in 1954 he published a work he began in Mexico, Abans de l'alba (Before Dawn), which is fruit of his interest in pre-Columbian cultures. This is his most widely-read work since the publisher reissued it with considerable success as a text book for Catalan language teaching nineteen years later. In this work he described the Quiche Mayan cosmology on the basis of the story told in the sacred Mayan book Popol-Vuh. He abridges and rewrites the work in a perfectly constructed account, offering a very fine piece of hypertextuality, which was an extremely original contribution in Catalan literature. Shortly afterwards, in 1956, his La ciutat i el tròpic (City and Tropic) appeared, after having received the Víctor Català Prize the previous year. In this book he "sets about presenting myth, not because of fascination with its marvels or ancestral component but as an intimate, inextricable part of reality and the human condition". The book includes a masterpiece "Naufragis" (Wrecks) and an excellent short novel, El centaure i el cavaller (The Centaur and the Knight). In 1960 he published Érem quatre (There Were Four of Us). Narrated in first person by Pau, a Catalan exile, it uses the Toltec myth of Quetzalcoatl to portray his reality, which includes a combination of archaeological adventure and amorous conflict set against a dramatic background of failure. His last published book, Miralls tèrbols (Turbid Mirrors), which evokes his home town in the times of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, appeared in 1966. This work constitutes a change of theme, setting and even style. He uses traditional techniques in fiction that imbibes from psychological analysis and realism, set against a background of the parable of the prodigal son.

Journalism, Essay and Children’s Literature
In the 1960s he resumed his journalistic writing, which he restricted to Catalan, and this work was published in Serra d'Or, Tele-Estel, et cetera. The articles ranged from literary criticism, to cultural reports and travel writing as well as opinion pieces. At the end of the decade he began to write on a permanent basis for Vida Parroquial d'Arenys, in which the children’s section "Racó de la Mainada" (Children’s Corner), a veritable anthology of universal literature for children, was particularly noteworthy. During this period he was also writing stories for children in Tretzevents and Cavall Fort besides translating novels by such authors A. J. Cronin (Beyond This Place – Enllà); Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea – El vell i la mar), which Joan Triadú deemed to be one of the best translations of this work in any language; Anna Langfus (Le Sel et le Soufre [Salt and Sulphur] – La sal i el sofre); and Saunders Lewis (The Hanged Man’s Rope – La corda del penjat), a drama he translated together with E. T. Lawrence. Moreover, he taught Catalan in Arenys de Mar and engaged in other cultural activities, for example his work as literary director of Discogràfica Vergara.

The 1970s opened up a new era, lasting two decades, in which Ferran de Pol devoted himself to writing essays. In 1973 he published De lluny i de prop (From Far and Near), a volume in which he brings together articles and occasional pieces besides rewriting in Catalan part of his memoir Campo de concentración (Concentration Camp, 1939). This task of rewriting entailed an ideological change, in which he adds a series of reflections that were absent in the original Mexican typescript and that pertain to the issues that arose in his work with Quaderns de l'Exili. He also returned to his study of the playwright Àngel Guimerà in the form of a number of articles and, in 1976, he received the El Vendrell Town Council Estudi Prize for works on the life and works of Àngel Guimerà for his essay Àngel Guimerà, l'home i l'escriptor, which has never been published. He wrote for the newspapers Avui, El Maresme, Diari de Barcelona, amongst others, while also penning and publishing books for children, including Sedna (1980), Entre tots ho farem tot (All Together We’ll Do It All, 1982) and El gegant i el rabadà. Neu al parc (The Giant and the Shepherd Boy – Snow in the Park, 1993).

However, what really marked these last years in Ferran de Pol’s work is the absence of publications, his unpublished work.


Lluís Ferran de Pol, Unpublished Works
One of the most striking aspects of the publishing world today is the non-publication of writers who cannot be slotted into the parameters of what is known as modernity. The publishing market in the Catalan-language territories does not generally accept works like those written by Ferran de Pol, or those of other writers of his own or earlier generations. Anything that is not literature for the educational market, or literature by men or women writers with a high profile in the mass media is not readily accepted by publishers. In addition, Lluís Ferran de Pol was a writer who shunned public gatherings, social-literary events and was never a habitué of Barcelona cultural circles. All of this came with a price and, accordingly, too much of his work has remained unpublished to the present day. Furthermore, it has taken decades to reissue some of his books, for example Abans de l'alba and La ciutat i el tròpic, which were out of print until 1994 and 1995 respectively.

Taking an overall view of his unpublished work –of uneven quality in comparison with his known writings– one might single out his unfinished Llegendes del Popol-Vuh (Legends of Popol-Vuh) and the play La princesa que vivia a l'infern (The Princess Who Lived in Hell, 1980), variations on the Popol-Vuh myth and Abans de l'alba. Ferran de Pol, who had a deep love for children, was always interested in literature for this age group, which he wrote with the same devotion and dedication as he did the rest of his work. Among this genre is his Vilacucut dels núvols (Cuckooville in the Clouds, 1984), a delicious story of some children who discover the world of birds. As for his fiction for adults, the last novel he was working on until just over a year ago is Jo, Ella i el Càntic (Me, Her and the Canticle, 1986). Although this book was a finalist for the Sant Jordi (Saint George) prize and it was due to be published, it remained in galley-proof form and was never printed. Set between Wales and Catalonia in the 1960s, it is a love-and-death story of the antihero Pere Tallada.

Ferran de Pol was a man of literary projects that, unfortunately, he never managed to develop. Among these, he designed a narrative cycle of works he never managed to write, novels titled, for example Batalla de l'Ebre (Battle of the Ebro) and L'afusellament del passat (The Execution of the Past), which were to have constituted part of the Saga del Somni i l'Amargor (Saga of Dreams and Bitterness). Miralls tèrbols is the work that came to light from this project. There are also a number of short stories that never appeared in a collection. These were published in different reviews and collective volumes, while some as-yet unpublished stories were to have appeared in a collection called Tres peixos i una peixera (Three Fish and One Fish Tank).

Another of the large shadowy areas of the works and person of Ferran de Pol is a genre that the public is unaware of as also being part of him, even though it was very near and dear to him: theatre. In the 1960s, spurred on by the literary situation of the country and what was happening in the domain of theatre, he went regularly to premieres of plays and to interesting Latin theatre cycles in Barcelona. Testifying to this are the articles he wrote in Tele-Estel, which were eventually brought together in De lluny i de prop. This was an enthusiasm he shared with his wife Esyllt, and they jointly wrote prologues, articles and programme notes for plays. However, Ferran de Pol was not only a fan of the theatre as a spectator but as a playwright as well. His first work was Costa Brava, which he unsuccessfully presented for the Josep Maria de Sagarra Prize (1963). In addition, in the thematic cycle of Abans de l'alba, he wrote the aforementioned play La princesa que vivia a l'infern.

Among Ferran de Pol’s work in the genre of the essay, there are two names that stand out for their political and literary interest: Àngel Guimerà and Francesc Macià. With regard to the former, I have mentioned his unpublished study of 1976. As for the latter, he wrote –encouraged by Joan Oliver– a biography titled Francesc Macià i el seu temps (revelació de l'heroi) (Francesc Macià and His Times (Revelation of a Hero)). He wrote the three first sections of the book, which are still of interest today, despite the passing of time and subsequent historical research.

Many writers bring together their journalistic pieces in book form. It is incomprehensible that no book collecting the articles published by Ferran de Pol throughout the seventies and eighties has yet appeared. The yellowed pages of the newspapers have been condemned to oblivion but his pieces would certainly amount to several volumes. Among these would be his "Hores Britàniques" (British Hours), published in Diari de Barcelona and also the set of articles on Arenys de Mar that appeared in El Maresme. He had thought about giving these latter pieces the collective title of De la Placeta al Cementeri de Sinera (From the Square to the Sinera Cemetery). Quite apart from these, of course, are the hundreds of articles he published in Spanish when he was in Mexico.

Finally, I should like to mention his letters. Few people would not recognise correspondence, this more personal fragment of literature, as an intrinsic part of a writer’s work. Ferran de Pol wrote many letters and received many too. His epistolary –including correspondence with, among others, Salvador Espriu, Joan Oliver, Xavier Benguerel and Joan Sales, his publisher and comrade-in-arms and comrade-in-letters– has yet to be published.

For those of us who have had the good fortune to know him, there is also the oral, lucid, ironic but emphatic Ferran de Pol, a man who seduced the young people of Arenys with his conversation in his famous office in Pas Sota Estudi or in the gatherings held at the P. Fidel Fita Library and, then again, there is the Ferran de Pol who, in recent years –and I want to remember him like this– at dusk and looking out over our sea, emotionally recalled the Battle of the Ebro and railed against the barbarians who wanted to undo the unity of the Catalan language.

After his death, we are left with the luminosity of his books, the future light of new readers, men and women of the Catalan-language territories.