“Be yourself no matter what they say/ Oh, I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien/ I’m an Englishman in New York”, cantaba Sting en una canción de 1987, Englishman in New York, inspired by the writer Quentin Crisp, who, tired of homophobic attacks, settled in New York. Ponç Pons (Menorca, 1956) would never live there: in 2007 he spent a few days, invited to give a poetic recital before young people, literature students who wanted to be writers. During his stay he did not stop writing and, thirteen years later, this is the result.
On the cover of the book you can see some wild olive branches, some round pines, the sky with some mist, some prickly pears and a small mimosa, planted just a little, that surround a little wooden house: Sa Figuera Verda, in the municipality of Alaior, in Menorca. From this little house, Pons has written books of poems and diaries, stories and novels, among which the most recent stand out: Dillatari (2005) and The blue trail of ants (2014).
He has found there a paradise to read, listen to music, think and harmonize with nature. He is also a teacher and one of the most emotional episodes in the book is when he explains that he stands in front of the blackboard, in class, with boys and girls from families who have come from all over the world to work in Menorca and writes: “Si no pots Viure to the land that you estimate, love the land where you live”.
The author Pons Ponç (Quaderns Crema)
He trip to new york it serves for beef up the conviction of benefits of Menorcan life and the passion for culture. Alaior is Alaiork, the ideal city. Menorca, the United States of Menorca. If it snows in New York, think of Robert Walser. In Greenwich Village he remembers Dylan Thomas. The confusion caused by the overflowing urbanism refers him to the masters of haiku, the ontological passion that saves him from emptiness and restlessness. Literature is behind everything you see and everything you experience. Pons has a word to say it:
write.
Pons feels horror before the idea of the interruption of the secular tradition of Menorcan life. Of the landscape destruction. Of the disappearance of the language. From the forgetting of literature. If 20th century artists traveled to New York in search of a beacon of modernity, Pons looks unconvinced, and finds a world without horizon in which it is not possible to connect with the cosmos. It is clear that it is not a literature passatist: delves into the present in body and soul, with the pleasure of reading, which requires some preparation.
Pons delves into the present in body and soul, with the pleasure of reading, which requires some preparation
Three moments: the conversation with a plump black woman in the subway (While Roser, his partner, warns him that New York is not Menorca and that he cannot go talking to strangers). The image of Seferis of the truncated marbles of the columns of the Acropolis like lighter stones. And the recommendation to read the Menorcan writer Àngel Ruiz i Pablo.
I have a copy of the Catalan work edited by Selecta that the Menorcan photographer Toni Vidal gave me, who is waiting for me. Ponç Pons vindicates with enthusiasm The owner in S’Uestrà Check: the story of a country man, legal alien in town. Thanks friend illustrious, for the recommendation, and for your book.
Ponç Pons
‘The Olive Trees of Manhattan’
CREAM NOTEBOOKS. 100 PAGES. 14 EUROS
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