Catalan culture is lacking in vest in terms of biographies and portraits of its protagonists. Overcome fearby Jordi Amat (published in Catalan by Edicions 62 y in Spanish by Tusquets) fills an important gap. Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972) was the touchstone for modernize many aspects of Catalan literature of the second half of the 20th century, and this year marks the centenary of his birth -and the fiftieth anniversary of his death- two fundamental books have just been published to get closer to the author of women and days. One is the biography written by Jordi Amat, and the other is Give nuts to childrenthe anthology that Marina Porras has prepared for the Autories de Comanegra collection.
To say that Gabriel Ferrater is a key figure in Catalan literature It may sound like a repeated and exaggerated formula, but listening to Jordi Amat’s arguments immediately reveals the international dimension of the poet from Reus. “Gabriel Ferrater changes the evolution of Catalan poetry, changes and deepens the understanding of Catalan culture in the 20th century. He is a necessary actor in the fundamental moment of modernization, he transcends the Catalan sphere because he is synchronized with other European intellectuals”, explained Jordi Amat the day of the presentation in the press of the awaited biography of Ferrater.
Gabriel Ferrater is a key figure in Catalan literature
And yes, these arguments may also sound abstract, but anyone who opens the Body theory and randomly read one of his poems you will realize that that way of writing shines with the strength of the best precious stones used by Ausiàs March in his verses. “It is a character of European scope synchronized with his time. He is an interlocutor of Gombrowicz, when he reads in Sontag he realizes who he is, he is the one who best reads Time of silencehas a privileged intelligence”, adds Amat.
And yes, as Jordi Cornudella pointed out in the presentation, “Ferrater’s character is part of a boiling current of publishing, and looking at him serves to look at Barcelona, Catalan, European culture and the publishing world”. It was Cornudella who proposed to Jordi Amat to take care of writing Ferrater’s biography. A complicated assignment that has burned many attempts, including the one attempted by Josep Maria Castellet. surely because Ferrater’s figure is heavily colored by his suicide, by alcohol and other vicissitudes that mask the work he left behind, not only as a poet or literary theorist, but also as a linguist.
Run away from the shadow of the cursed character
At the hour of writing Overcome fearJordi Amat has wanted to escape the shadow of cursed character dragging Ferrater, and has clung to the documents. But the facts are the facts: Ferrater’s father killed himself so the family could collect life insurance; her mother threw herself into the patio of lights of her house; Joan Ferraté stopped taking her medication to die on a specific date, and Gabriel Ferrater committed suicide by mixing alcohol with pills and putting a plastic bag over his head just before his fiftieth birthday. Inevitably, it is not necessary to have the soul of Sherlock Holmes to deduce that these family circumstances weighed heavily on Gabriel Ferrater’s career.
At the time of writing Conquer fear, Jordi Amat wanted to flee from the shadow of the cursed character that drags Ferrater
For all these reasons, Jordi Amat has tried to understand Gabriel Ferrater from within, and became obsessed with documentingfor not depending on oral funds, which would reinforce a myth that seemed to him that they would make it difficult to understand the character. I wanted to build a chronology as accurate as possible, to find out what exactly was going on that week in 1966 when Jill Jarrell left him. Letters, telegrams, texts, interviews and documentation of all kinds, both public and private, is the material that Amat has used to build a biography that will surely will not fully satisfy everyonebut that in no case is a total disappointment.
Regarding the correspondence consulted, Amat has acknowledged that both the letters with his mother Amàlia Soler and with Jill JarrellThey have been of great help in making this book. As has also been the list of the books he bought at the Herder bookstore on Balmes street, a letter from Helena Valentí, the prescriptions that the doctor made for him, or the files of his work on Ausiàs March.
“Something I wanted to discover is the personal process that takes him to write how he does it. Gabriel Ferrater explodes and breaks tradition and that is perceived with a certain fear by the people of the precarious post-war Catalan literature. The same people who prevent Mercè Rodoreda from winning the [premio] Sant Jordi in 1981 “, reflects Jordi Amat.
After working for a long time, Amat has come to the conclusion that fear ran through most of Gabriel Ferrater’s life. Hence the title. A title that appears after the author read the following excerpt from one of Joan Ferraté’s diaries: “Fear does not let itself be overcome, because it is the other side of all our affirmations, and above all of the deepest and most essential ones: overcoming fear would perhaps be nothing but the same as committing suicide”. Following this thread, and as Jordi Amat points out, Ferrater in the poem In Memorial He already makes it very clear that the only stage in which he is not afraid is youth and that is why the poet “needs to be close to young people and young women.”
Amat has come to the conclusion that fear ran through most of Gabriel Ferrater’s life
Of these women, the only one who has deserved her own chapter in Overcome fear is Helena Valenti. The episode opens with this quote from Ramon Barnils: “This Helena is, above all else, the person that Ferrater, by personal decision, decided to keep as a point of reference. maximum interest of his moral and sentimental lifeAccording to some documents, Helena Valentí was one of the people who best understood Gabriel Ferrater, a woman who saw the tortured being that he was, despite the fact that he hid it dressed in his turtleneck sweaters, jeans and sneakers.
For its part, the anthology Give nuts to children, by Marina Porras, includes some of the essential texts to approach the work of Gabriel Ferrater, the articles and works he wrote on literature, language, painting and letters, some public and others private, such as those addressed to Helena Valenti. But the most interesting part of this volume is the prologue by Marina Porras, where she reviews the life and work of the poet chronologically and which presents a Ferrater, something Jay Gatsby, something like the characters in The beach de Cesare Pavese.
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