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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810140653 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2019 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The poet Josep Vicenç Foix i Mas (1893–1987) is a major figure in modern Catalan literature who has influenced generations of writers down to the present. Under the pen name of J. V. Foix (his surname is pronounced "Fosh" with a long "o"), he published many individual volumes, but his greatest achievements consist of three books. Sol, i de dol (Alone, and In Mourning, 1947), a collection of seventy sonnets that address such themes as love and the role of the poet, synthesizes Foix's traditional and avant-garde interests by drawing on medieval poetry in Catalan, Provençal, and Italian, including the work of Ausiàs March, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Guido Cavalcanti. Les irreals omegues (The Unreal Omegas, 1949), a poem in thirteen sections, develops a symbolist style to address the problems of living during the Spanish Civil War and after, under Franco's fascist regime, which enforced strict censorship and sought to suppress the Catalan language. In the Diari 1918 (Daybook 1918), a collection of prose poems, Foix's writing turns oneiric as he endows recognizably Catalan customs and geography with a surrealist quality.
Between roughly 1909 and 1925, Foix got into the habit of making diaristic notes that recorded experiences, reflections, ideas, and images. These notes became the basis of two kinds of prose texts — one autobiographical, chronicling his encounters with mentors and associates, the other poetic, exploring a lyric vein in fragmentary narratives. It is these poetic narratives that came to form the Diari 1918. Foix initially planned the project as a collection of three hundred sixty-five prose poems, one for each day of the year, but he completed only 203, which he published in book-length selections over several decades before gathering them into one volume in 1981. He put the texts from the start of his career in a section he called "primers fragments" ("early fragments"), work that began appearing in 1918 in periodicals and then in his first two books, Gertrudis (1927) and KRTU (1932). These early fragments constitute the core of the translation that follows.
* * *
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of Catalan writers and artists looked to the modernist avant-garde movements in Europe to invigorate native literary and artistic traditions. They were gauging the aesthetic and political value of diverse experimental practices as Catalonia itself experimented with autonomous government before the advent of Franco's dictatorship in 1939. Foix in particular saw himself as an "investigator in poetry," exploring a variety of poetics, and he conducted his investigations not only in poems but also in the many notes, articles, and essays he published in the periodicals which were then proliferating in Catalonia, especially in Barcelona. These newspapers and magazines were filled with nationalist pronouncements and debates even as the contributors busily welcomed foreign literature and art through imitations and translations as well as commentary.
For the biweekly La Revista Foix wrote a column that surveyed the contents of periodicals in various countries, including Argentina, France, Italy, and Spain. In 1918, for instance, he presented the latest issue of Pierre Reverdy's journal, NordSud, summarizing Reverdy's account of the poetic image. In the same year, Foix assumed the editorship of Trossos (Pieces), a magazine that became an important vehicle for his work even though it lasted only six issues. As editor he ran brief accounts of Cubism and Futurism and announced the Parisian publication of Guillaume Apollinaire's play Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1918), where the French writer coined the term "surrealist." In the same magazine, Foix also published his Catalan translations of poems by Philippe Soupault and Ezio Bolongaro, as well as two of his own surrealist narratives. This activity points to the significance of the year 1918 for him: it represents a watershed in his development as a writer.
Foix's most important contribution to the Catalan press proved to be his work for La Publicitat, a daily newspaper that became the organ of the nationalist political party, Acció Catalana. Between 1922 and 1936, when the Spanish Civil War erupted, Foix published several hundred articles in variously titled columns ("Meridians," "Itineraris," "Panorama Universal de les Lletres," among others), anonymously at first, then under his name or initials, and finally with a succession of pseudonyms. He commented on decisive political events at home and abroad, criticizing the rise of fascism in Germany and in Italy and the repressiveness of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Although he admired the nationalist dedication of Charles Maurras's Action Française, he rejected the French ideologue's monarchism. "For us," Foix wrote in 1931, "Catalanism has always been an essentially republican movement." He discussed canonical works of Catalan literature, such as Ramon Llull's Llibre de les Bèsties (c. 1287) and Joanot Martorell and Martí Joan de Galba's chivalric romance, Tirant lo Blanc (1490). He emphasized contemporary thinkers, writers, and artists to whom he was especially attracted, discussing the work of Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, Alexander Blok and André Breton, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst. Between 1930 and 1936, La Publicitat also ran Foix's Catalan versions of Paul Éluard's poetry.
These interventions were designed to increase the sophistication of Foix's readers. He militated against any provinciality by examining Catalan cultural and political issues in relation to the latest international developments. In effect, he was instructing Catalans on how to read his own cosmopolitan poetry by documenting his various affiliations, foreign as well as domestic.
Still, Foix did not assign equal value to every Catalan reception of foreign currents, particularly where the modernist avant-gardes were concerned. In "Avant-gardism," a 1921 essay for the monthly Monitor: Gaseta Nacional de Política, d'Art i de Literatura, he likened the "patriotic upstartism" that appears in "every nationalism" to the "fever to draw attention to themselves" that infected "some avant-gardists." He particularly lamented Catalan experiments "that, lacking control and tending directly toward the mutilation of the language at the moment of its rehabilitation, could exert a dangerous influence." In mentioning the "rehabilitation" of Catalan, he was referring to the efforts of the linguist Pompeu Fabra to standardize the orthography and grammar of the language, culminating in the publication of Fabra's Diccionari General de la Llengua Catalana (1932). Foix acknowledged his own commitment to literary innovation, but he regarded "avant-gardism" as potentially "one of the factors that disrupt the stylistic elevation of our language." The challenge he saw facing the Catalan writer was how to prevent cosmopolitanism from devolving into "a confusion of diverse tendencies and clumsy applications" that would undermine a nationalist investment in Catalan literature.
* * *
Foix's interest in modernist experimentalism situated him in the margins of the contemporary cultural scene in Catalonia, where groups of writers and artists who reflected broader European trends vied for dominance. Modernisme, which despite its name was not an avant-garde but a decadent movement comparable to Art Nouveau, produced stunning achievements in architecture, painting, and the decorative arts, the work of turn-of-the-century figures like Antoni Gaudí and Ramon Casas. It also gave rise to a vibrant narrative and dramatic literature that questioned middle-class values and explored social problems. The most esteemed poet was Joan Maragall (1860–1911), who advocated a poetics of Nietzschean vitalism in his notion of the "paraula viva" ("living word"), a spontaneous use of language. Maragall's 1904 poem "L'ametller" (The Almond Tree) exemplifies his romantic approach, translated here so as to evoke comparable nineteenth-century British poetries:
Midmost on the side of the mountain I spied a blossoming almond tree: White flag, God grant you protection — ah the days when you delighted me! You are the peace that you announce betwixt the sun and cloud and wind ... The best climate has not yet beckoned, but you bear its utter jubilance.
In a notebook entry from 1911, Foix called Maragall's bluff, casting doubt on the authenticity of this poetry:
Wherever spontaneity, holy spontaneity, may exist — I would like to see the original drafts of the naïve adherents of spontaneity — there's a hitch. The spontaneity of the word in every farmhouse, in every individual — which are Maragall's preferred discourses — is typically the strident cry and the crude expression.
Maragall's verse, in contrast, is characterized by linguistic and prosodic refinement. Foix shrewdly saw that these features belie Maragall's vitalist claim that the poet enjoys a privileged connection to nature.
Foix entered into a more complicated relationship with Noucentisme. This somewhat later movement reacted against the romantic excesses typified by Maragall and, although modern in orientation, prized a poetic classicism that cultivated ornate styles. Coined by the writer Eugeni d'Ors (1881–1954), the term plays on the Catalan word for both "nine" and "new" ("nou") to refer to the twentieth century, the 1900s ("milnoucent" in Catalan), following Italian labels for historical periods like "cinquecento" (the 1500s or the sixteenth century). The daily newspaper with the widest circulation, La Veu de Catalunya (The Voice of Catalonia), became an important venue for Noucentisme, which found its most articulate spokesman in d'Ors. From 1906 to 1920 he contributed a column called Glosari (Glossary), where he spun urbanely ironic anecdotes that served to illustrate the principles of the movement.
On 23 June 1910, for example, the newspaper ran the column with a piece titled "Coets" (Rockets). The date marks the eve of the Feast of Sant Joan, or Saint John the Baptist, which Catalans celebrate with such rituals as bonfires and fireworks. Not only did d'Ors couch his parable in a custom that would be immediately familiar to his readers, he ingeniously exploited the appearance of Halley's Comet in April of that year:
A warm night in June. A Barcelonan steps out onto his terrace, fires off a rocket, and harks back to Halley's Comet.
As when the comet had passed, some time ago, every danger has now ceased, and the Barcelonan amuses himself with some philosophizing, some imagery.
He thinks: the comet is to the rocket as a tiger is to a cat. A rocket is a domesticated comet.
It is a paradox, furthermore, that the charm of comets in a wild state — stars with a tail — consists in calculated appearances, while the charm of comets in a domestic state — that is to say, rockets — consists in being unforeseen.
This point disagrees with any suspicion that civility is something with a fixed geometry.
On the contrary: Wildness is always a hugely fixed thing, since it leaves much room for the fated. Civility is a divine flower of contingency.
Rise, rise to the heights, unforeseen rockets, contingent rockets — norms! — freedoms!
For d'Ors, the rocket functions as an eloquent symbol that expresses the Noucentista advocacy of innovation ("freedoms") through constraint ("norms").
Foix's attitude toward this sort of writing was ambivalent at best. In another notebook entry from 1911, he disparaged the Noucentista author's style as displaying the "preciosity and decadence of the fin de siècle," producing "a Pre-Raphaelite, Ruskinian, even Wildean flavor which does not fade despite the strong classicizing compulsion of the commentator, so lucid, intelligent, astute, and incisive." Foix clearly shared Ezra Pound's critical view of nineteenth-century poeticism, what Pound called "the crust of dead English" that had "obfuscated" him in his poems and translations. Not only did Foix articulate a modernist criticism of British Romantic and Victorian poetry and use it to assess Catalan literary developments, he seems to have been thinking along these lines before Pound published his own remarks in essays like "A Retrospect" (1918) and "Guido's Relations" (1929).
The uncanniness of this coincidence does not stop here. Foix's knowledge of English was limited. Whatever he knew of anglophone writing was derived mostly, if not entirely, from translations — Catalan, Castilian, French. He published his Catalan versions of excerpts from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) soon after the poem appeared, although these versions were made from a French translation. Foix's critique of d'Ors's prose testifies to the international reach of modernism as well as to his intuitive comprehension of its ideas.
* * *
Noucentisme was deeply invested in Catalan nationalism, and that investment, particularly as articulated by Eugeni d'Ors, can be distinguished from Foix's ideological standpoint. The difference becomes evident in d'Ors's 1909 piece "Metics," where in reviving this ancient Greek term for foreign residents he followed contemporary French nationalists like Charles Maurras. In an 1894 article published in the right-wing newspaper La Cocarde, Maurras had denounced groups that he viewed as divisive and therefore threatening to the French nation, namely, Protestants, Masons, Jews, and "Métèques." While setting aside Maurras's Catholicism and anti-Semitism, d'Ors did share his xenophobia: "Metics" stigmatizes working-class immigrants, specifically citing "concierges and tram conductors" as weakening the emergent national community because they resist the "demographic expansion" of the Catalan language. D'Ors's vernacular nationalism goes hand in hand with a cultural "imperialism," as he himself called it. He demands the assimilation of foreigners to the "literary and intellectual" values of an indigenous, Barcelona-based elite who, unlike their Parisian counterparts, lack the cosmopolitanism that might enable them to withstand the "infiltration" of cultural differences.
Foix's modernism led him to conceive of a Catalan national culture that was much more open. In a 1933 article for La Publicitat, he addressed the question "Is there a Catalan school of superrealism?" while taking Salvador Dalí's paintings as his case. "We do not believe in a Catalan racial type," wrote Foix, "or in nationalism of a racial type," but he found that Dalí exemplifies a curious "paradox": he is a painter who is "ideologically without a homeland," even "a denier of the homeland," although he made his contribution to "universal painting" because of "his fidelity to the spirit of the tribe that gave birth to him." Dalí is a "European" surrealist precisely because his brand of "realism" is "profoundly, exclusively local" — that is to say, Catalonian, by which Foix seemed to refer to the striking landscapes in Dalí's paintings. In the 1935 essay "Homeland," Foix makes clear his opposition to any form of nationalism that is so assimilated to dominant ideologies at home as to subvert transnational values, including those that he felt should be seen as universal.
Nonetheless, Foix struggled to define the relation between his writing and the Catalan political situation. In his 1929 essay "Some Reflections on One's Own Literature," he expresses his belief that "some" of his writing occupies an ideological "position" that is "loyal" to Catalanism. To articulate this position, he describes two important decisions he made in his fledgling career: on the one hand, he discloses his "youthful ambition" to withhold his signature from what he describes as "the literary objectivation of [his] psychic states," the body of writing that would become the Diari 1918; on the other hand, he observes that he was "betraying this aspiration" when he chose to sign his work with a shortened form of his name, "J. V. Foix." He then concludes, cryptically, that "this retreat [retrocés] from individual ambition," the youthful decision to withhold his signature, "is only the consequence of the retreat from a collective ambition."
At first sight, this assertion might seem contradictory. One would think that retreating from "individual ambition" might be conducive to joining rather than retreating from a "collective" movement like Catalan nationalism. But the "retreat from a collective ambition" actually refers to a political setback in Catalonia's movement to found a nation: Primo de Rivera's Madrid-backed dictatorship (1923–1930) put an end to the regional commonwealth or Mancommunitat that had been established in 1914 to consolidate the provincial governments in Catalonia and to create cultural institutions like the Institut d'Estudis Catalans to standardize the Catalan language. Consequently, Foix decided to sign his work with his unmistakably Catalan surname, a gesture that was loyal in its ideological force but individualistic as a proper name.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Daybook 1918"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Lawrence Venuti.
Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
Early Fragments from the Daybook
Diari 1918 (Fragments) | Daybook 1918 (Fragments)
"He malferit" | "I wounded" 2
"Aixequeu ben alts" | "Raise high" 4
"M'assegurava que eren" | "She assured me" 6
"Quants de tombs" | "How many times" 8
"Diuen que estàs gelosa" | "They say you are jealous" 10
"Et vaig sorprendre" | "I caught you unawares" 12
"Les parets del court" | "The court walls" 14
"Que hagin aparedat" | "May doors and windows" 16
"En percebre de lluny" | "Upon perceiving my rival" 18
"Quan érem a la font" | "When we were standing together" 20
"A les sis de la tarda" | "At six in the afternoon" 22
"Les cases, de roure i de caoba" | "The houses of oak and mahogany" 24
La vila | The Village 26
7 h. 50-11 h. 50 | 7:50-11:50 30
Placa Catalunya-Pedralbes | Placa Catalunya-Pedralbes 32
Pepa, la lletera | Pepa the Milkmaid 36
Sense simbolisme | Without Symbolism 38
Notes sobre la mar | Notes on the Sea
1 "La sorpresa fou quan" | "The surprise occurred" 40
2 "Ben Higat el nas de cartó" | "Wearing a grotesque pasteboard nose" 42
3 "La mar, aquell man" | "The sea, that morning" 44
4 "De levita i copalta negre" | "Wearing black frock coats" 46
5 "En acabar-se el ball" | "As the ball comes to an end" 48
6 "De lluny tothom crida" | "From afar everyone shouts" 50
Notes del Diari | Notes from the Daybook
"No són cases" | "They are not houses" 52
"Perquè m'he pintat la faç" | "Beause I painted my face" 54
"Hi ha cavalls per portals" | "There are horses by doors" 56
Ombres darrere els lilàs | Shadows behind Lilacs
"Mil ales rosa" | "A thousand pink wings" 58
"Fou diumenge passat" | "Last Sunday" 60
"El Díaz i el Vicente" | "Díaz and Vicente" 62
"Nois i noies" | "Boys and girls" 64
"Perquè l'home" | "Because the dried-fruit vendor" 66
"Ni els peixos" | "The fish swimming" 68
"Feixos d'heura" | "Bundles of ivy" 70
"Palplantat a la porta" | "Stock-still at the door" 72
"Destenyits per la pluja" | "Faded by the rain" 74
"Tot just m'acabava" | "No sooner had my friend" 76
Retorn a la natura | Return to Nature
"Per un filferro" | "Along a wire" 78
"Fugir, fugir" | "Flee, flee" 80
"L'últim ocell" | "The last bird" 82
"Cap mà no em diu" | "No hand bids me" 84
"Per les obertures" | "Huge enameled amphoras" 86
"Só jo que porto" | "It is I who carry" 88
"És inútil que" | "In vain" 90
Vindré" més tard demà | I'll Come Later Tomorrow 92
On aniré tot sol | Where I Shall Go All Alone 94
Omitted Texts
Gertrudis 101
Christmas Story 104
"Deserted paths, lifeless thoroughfares" 110
KRTU 111
Notes on El Port de la Selva 113
Introductions
Salvador Dalí 116
Joan Miró 119
Artur Carbonell 121
Applications 122
Letter to a Friend and Colleague 125
Essays
Avant-gardism 129
Some Considerations on Current Literature and Art 135
Some Reflections on One's Own Literature 144
Homeland 147
Notes 151