Catalan Poetry

Medieval Period

Catalan, a romance language that serves as a bridge between the Ibero-Romanic and the Gallo-Romanic languages, is spoken today mainly in Spain, in the regions of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. In addition, it is the official language of the tiny nation of Andorra, which lies in the Pyrenees Mountains on the border between Spain and France. Although clearly related to its sister Romance languages, it is not a dialect but a fully developed language with a venerable history and literature of its own. It flourished from the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century, but during Francisco Franco’s totalitarian rule (1939-1975), it was banned from use in schools, government agencies, and the media. It did not die, however, but was reborn, along with a sometimes radical sense of nationalism, in the late 1970s after Franco’s death. In 1979, both Spanish and Catalan were officially recognized in Catalonia, and in 1983, the Linguistic Normalization Act reinvigorated the language’s use in official and commercial contexts. In 1997, the Catalan Language Act actually required broadcast media in Catalonia to offer programming in Catalan. Schools expose children to Catalan from a young age. This rebirth of the language has given rise to a revived interest in Catalan poetry both new and old.

Middle Ages

Catalan first produced its own poetry in the thirteenth century. Before that time, and for the next two hundred years, many powerful poets whose vernacular was Catalan chose instead to write in Provençal. The Provençal poets, neighbors geographically, had provided the forms and the lexicon of courtly love and had developed the prestige of amour courtois in lyric poetry. Although some Catalan poets of this period did occasionally write in Catalan, their best-known works are in the more prestigious Provençal. The troubadour Catalan school began to flourish in the late twelfth century; among its members were Count Ramon Berenguer IV, Guillem de Cabestany, Guerau de Cabrera, Guillem de Bergadà, Cerverí de Girona, and Ramon Vidal de Besalú. The latter two were jongleurs or troubadours. Their sensitive love lyrics and highly sophisticated rhyme schemes were faithful to earlier Provençal models; among their themes were amour courtois of a political nature and satiric social verse.

Provençal, the language of art, was noticeably different from daily speech in Catalan. An important factor in maintaining the predominance of Provençal was the poetic Consistory of Toulouse, “de la Gaya Sciencia,” at which Catalan poets writing in Provençal were winning contestants more often than not. This poetic contest, later named the Jocs Florals, has been revived in Toulouse and Barcelona since the nineteenth century, although Provençal is no longer the requisite language.

Raymond Lull

A chronological study of the masterpieces of Catalan poetry begins with the Cancó de Santa Fe (c. 1075), which represents an early, still formative Catalan that nevertheless resembles modern Catalan much more closely than the language of the Chanson de Roland (twelfth century; The Song of Roland, 1880) resembles modern French. Into the formless genre of Catalan poetry, there suddenly burst the most brilliant, fecund author and thinker of all Catalan literature, Raymond Lull (c. 1235-1316). His stature in Catalan letters is comparable to that of Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italian literature.

Although Lull’s writings encompass a broad literary range, he is particularly appreciated for his poetry, including Libre d’amic e amat (c. 1285; The Book of the Lover and Beloved, 1923), Lo desconhort (c. 1295; lamentation), and Cant de Ramon (c. 1299; song of Raymond). Lull, a Franciscan, wrote almost innumerable philosophical and theological treatises in Latin, Arabic, and Catalan. His Catalan novel Libre d’Evast e Blanquerna (1283; English translation, 1925), composed in five parts that symbolize the five wounds of Christ, is considered his masterpiece; embedded in this novel is the highly poetic, internally rhyming prose poem The Book of the Lover and Beloved, which echoes the biblical Song of Songs and anticipates Saint John of the Cross in its celebration of the mystic ecstasy of lover and beloved.

Lull’s encyclopedic Libre de contemplació (1273; Book of Contemplation, 1985) is a doctrinal work, while his Libre de meravelles (1288-1289; Felix: Or, Book of Wonders, 1985) is concerned with the revelation of God in nature, particularly in the section titled Libre de les bèsties (c. 1290; The Book of the Beasts, 1927), in which animals assume anthropomorphic roles. Among his other Catalan texts is the Libre de l’orde de cavalleria (1279; The Book of the Order of Chivalry, 1484), which became a manual for medieval knighthood and which was closely imitated by Don Juan Manuel in Castilian. Lull’s Opera latina is principally theological and rigorously Scholastic in approach, while Libre del gentil e dels tres savis (1274-1276; The Book of the Gentile and Three Wise Men, 1985) is a balanced discussion of the respective religious positions of a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim. Lull produced many other works in both Latin and Arabic.

A noble and amoral courtier as a young man, Lull underwent a dramatic conversion at the age of thirty. He left his wife, children, and rank to become a Franciscan, dedicating himself to studying, teaching, writing, and converting Muslims and Jews. He traveled and taught widely, writing in different languages for widely divergent audiences. He made more than one trip to Tunis, perhaps dying while he was there or soon thereafter as a martyr, stoned by a mob. He is venerated not only as a great scholar, thinker, and poet but also as a religious figure, having attained the rank of Blessed.

Lull was the first great poet to write in Catalan. It is almost certain that, during his dissolute and courtly youth, he practiced versifying in Provençal, but after his conversion, he wrote in Catalan, using poetic forms borrowed from Provençal, except in The Book of the Lover and Beloved. In addition to being the first champion of Catalan poetry and prose, Lull was the first Catalan poet to delineate the Franciscan approach to God through nature, a tradition that has persisted in Catalan poetry to the present day. Lull’s desire to demonstrate the rationality of the Christian faith and to recognize the universe as a manifestation of the Divine informed his philosophical and poetic quest.

Lo desconhort is one of Lull’s best-known poems. Written in monorhymed Alexandrines, it is a highly personal analysis of his failures, imbued with pessimism and personal frustration. Readers today sense the poet’s personality quite strongly while recognizing the theme of unfulfilled personal aspirations as universal and timeless.

Lull employed poetic form not to exhibit his artistry but merely to provide a vehicle for his deeply felt religious expression. Concept and emotion take precedence over art, which had become hollow to him after his conversion. He was perceived during his own lifetime as a scholar, theologian, and prose writer, and a full appreciation of his poetry developed in the twentieth century. Lull was able to free himself from ritual Provençalisms and artistic rigidity precisely because of his overwhelming religious purpose.

After the uniquely personal poetry of Lull, the fourteenth century passed without the emergence of another significant Catalan poet. While the popular vernacular lyric did exist, the more erudite court poets continued the Provençal tradition, and the Catalan epics of the period were written exclusively in prose.

The Renaissance

The Catalan Renaissance began with the reign of Martí L’Humà in 1396, extending to 1516 and covering the reigns of Ferdinand Alfons IV of Catalonia, Alfons V of Aragon, Joan II, and Ferdinand II. Under Alfons, the center of the Catalan kingdom was Naples, which served as a meeting ground for Catalan and Italian poets and other intellectuals. Italian poets and writers, particularly Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, were influential in the middle and late phases of the Catalan Renaissance in both poetry and prose. Provençal influences continued to be dominant in the early stage of the Renaissance, especially in the poems of Gilabert de Pròixita and Andreu Febrer, the latter also a translator of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) in terza rima.

Jordi de Sant Jordi

Jordi de Sant Jordi (c. 1400-1424), poet, courtier, and soldier, was the outstanding poet of the young Catalan Renaissance. His love poetry appears in his collection Estramps (c. 1420; free verses). The flavor of his unrhymed, decasyllabic verse is Petrarchan, though still with a hint of Provençal. He was much appreciated for his adaptation of Italianate love themes, reminiscent of the dolce stil nuovo. The elegance of his Catalan was innovative and raised Catalan poetic diction and versification to new heights of expressiveness and sensitivity, achieved through sophisticated harmonizing of vocabulary and syntax.

Ausiàs March

The greatest poet of the Catalan Renaissance was Ausiàs March (1397-1459). His influence has been so far-reaching that he is still the most highly respected poet of classic Catalan literature. Catalan poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continuously studied, imitated, and drew inspiration from March’s controlled emotional torment. Among the Renaissance Castilian poets who admired and cited him were the Marqués de Santillana, Garcilaso de la Vega, Gutierre de Cetina, and Francisco de Herrera.

March, poet and soldier-statesman, came from a noble literary family. He sings of the paradox of carnal love and its purification, the path from eros to caritas. His verse is poetically intense, involved actively in the Renaissance, but retaining vestiges of the late Middle Ages. His profound suffering in the course of a carnal and impossible love, followed by the death of his youthful mistress, provided him with his single, obsessive subject. What remained to be done after his personal tragedy was to replace eros with caritas in the manner of Dante and Beatrice. The death of the beloved created the possibility of this replacement, but since March was sincere in his moral code, this death was not a sufficient expiation; it robbed him of the possibility of attaining a “perfect” love in the course of life in this world. His expiation then became a unique experience, interiorized and always present to conscience and consciousness.

In March’s Cants d’amor (c. 1450; songs of love), love is carnal, forbidden, and guilty. His preoccupation with sinful love marked a transition in Catalan poetry. In March’s time, many Catalan poets were still writing in Provençal, following the traditional precepts of courtly love. In contrast, March was absolutely sincere in his recognition of the iniquity of carnal love but hesitant to deny it totally in his desire for the unattainable Teresa Bou, who assumed for him a role very similar to that of Beatrice for Dante.

March renounced the cult of form to write a dense, cerebral poetry. His language, like his style, is sober, measured, and direct, nakedly expressing his tortured passion. His preferred form is the decasyllabic line, the same form later used by Maurice Scève in the sixteenth century. March’s poems are a conversation, a dialogue and debate between the lover and his soul; their concerns are as vital in the twenty-first century as they were in the fifteenth.

Joan Roiç de Corella and Jaume Roig

After March, two other Valencian poets of note appeared in the Catalan Renaissance: Joan Roiç de Corella and Jaume Roig. Roiç de Corella wrote Tragèdia de Caldesa (fifteenth century), lyric love poetry devoted to his beloved, Caldesa; he also wrote religious poetry devoted to the Virgin.

Roig is remembered for the narrative poem Spill o llibre de les dones (c. 1460; Mirror: Or, Book of Women), the most violent misogynistic diatribe of the Hispanic peninsula and one of the most extreme antifeminist works written in any century. Composed in a brusque, five-syllable line, it is full of crude descriptions that contrast radically with the tradition of lyric poetry; indeed, its content is essentially novelistic, and the choice of form has made the work an oddity in Catalan letters.

The Decadence

In the fifteenth century, Catalan literature and culture fell into a decline that continued into the nineteenth century. With the ascendancy of Castile, power shifted away from the Catalan-speaking lands. As a result, Catalan poetry suffered; typical was the case of Juan Boscán (c. 1490-1542), a Catalan who wrote only in Castilian. Only Pere Serafí (c. 1505-1567), Francesc Vicenç Garcia (1582-1623), and Francesc Fontanella (1622-1685?) attempted to keep formal Catalan poetry alive during the decadence. Poetry continued on the popular level, however, particularly in the sixteenth century. It has survived in the anonymous Romancer/Canconer (poem collection), which contains many famous ballads, such as “Els estudiants de Tolosa” (the students of Tolosa), “El testament d’Amelià” (Amelia’s will), “El Comte Arnau” (Count Arnau), and “La dama d’Aragó” (the lady of Aragon); many of these ballads are written in a fourteen-syllable line of rhyming couplets with a caesura at the hemistich.

The Renaixença

The nineteenth century brought a renewed sense of patriotism to Catalonia, and this renewal had intellectual overtones. Poetry was to play a great part in the Catalan cultural resurgence; indeed, it can be said that the lifeblood of modern Catalan literature is its poetry, which has nourished the culture with regular infusions of contemporary masterpieces.

One must begin an appreciation of modern Catalan poetry with the remarkable poetic event that initiated the Renaixença (rebirth) of Catalan letters: the newspaper publication in 1833 of “La Pàtria,” an ode by Bonaventura Carles Aribau (1798-1862). After a lapse of three centuries, Aribau had captured the spirit of Catalonia in a nostalgic, Romantic evocation of landscape. The Catalan population had continued speaking Catalan during the three centuries since Serafí, and scholarly interest in the language had increased in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century brought a renewed interest in the Middle Ages and in past grandeur; in this climate, “La Pàtria” provided the necessary impulse for the Renaixença. Once underway, the Catalan cultural revival was eagerly supported by intellectuals, scholar-poets such as Milà i Fontanals, archivists, and the Catalan people in general.

One consequence of the Renaixença was the reestablishment of the Jocs Florals in 1859, with the stipulation that Catalan be used exclusively. One of the winners was the epic and lyric poet Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902). Verdaguer, often called Mossén Cinto, is the best known and most highly esteemed poet of the Renaixença. His complete works were available during his lifetime, and he was a living inspiration to and symbol of the Catalan people during the nineteenth century. Catalan scholars now consider Verdaguer’s works to represent the long first flowering of the Renaixença, with its Romantic, religious, patriotic, and epic tendencies. Verdaguer’s Franciscan humanism, his enrichment of the Catalan language, and his evocation of Catalan history and landscape combine in a formula that has given him a unique place as the patriarch of modern Catalan literature.

The Mallorcan school

While Verdaguer was writing near Barcelona, Maria Aguilo was laying the foundations for poetry and literature in Mallorca in the nineteenth century, influencing Valencian poetry as well. Teodor Llorenc and Vicent Querol were nineteenth-century poets of the simple life. Josep Lluis Pons i Gallarça, another Mallorcan poet, led the way for Miquel Costa i Llobera (1854-1922), the most famous Mallorcan poet of the early twentieth century. Costa i Llobera, a priest and admirer of Horace, combined a sensitivity to the beauty and serenity of Mallorca with Christian fervor. His poetic intensity is refined, controlled, but deeply felt. Joan Alcover, Gabriel Alomar, Llorenç Riber, Miquel dels Sants Oliver, Maria Antònia Salvà, Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel, and J. M. Llompart are other Mallorcan poets who followed the example of Costa i Llobera.

Juan Maragall

Juan Maragall (1860-1911) was a contemporary of Verdaguer but differed from him as much as the Mallorcan school did in its own way. Maragall was concerned with aesthetics and the act of creating poetry, and his personal wealth, happy marriage, and social status allowed him the luxury of composing on his own terms. He relied on the moment of inspiration for his lyric poetry, not on forms, styles, or foreign influences. More of an intellectual than Verdaguer, his themes are love, death and resurrection, and Catalonia.

Maragall’s admiration for German and Greek literature led him away from the Romantic tendencies of the Jocs Florals. His inner fire and his belief in his own inspiration helped him to create his own style, highly personal, negligent in form, and new in approach. His “Canto espiritual” has been compared by numerous scholars to works of March and Lull. Maragall remains a pivotal figure in Catalan letters because he moved Catalan poetry forward aesthetically and stylistically.

Modernism

Maragall’s influence brought about an explosion of Catalan poetry in the early and mid-twentieth century; Josep Carner, Jaume Bofill i Mates, and Josep Maria López-Picó were particularly indebted to Maragall. Joaquim Folguera (1894-1919), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (1894-1924), and the Mallorcan Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel (1913-1938) were unable to fulfill their great potential; all three died young. Salvat-Papasseit’s soul-wrenching intensity gives his verse a peculiarly modern flavor and makes it among the most powerful in Catalan literature of any period. Other outstanding poets who were contemporaries of Salvat-Papasseit are Agustí Esclasans, Clementina Arderiu, J. V. Foix, Marià Manent, Josep Maria de Sagarra, Tomàs Garcés, Ventura Gassol, Carles Riba, and Josep Sebastià Pons of Roussillon, a Catalan in that now-French region. Several of these poets were associated with the movement known as Noucentisme (“1900-ism”), which rejected the late Romanticism of Verdaguer and the provincialism of nineteenth-century Catalan culture.

Josep Carner (1884-1971) spent much of his life outside Catalonia, but his influence still places him at the apex of modern Catalan poets. Whereas Maragall sought the “living word” of inspiration, Carner, a lover of wordplay, was a master of form and controlled emotion. He was a “poet’s poet” of great inner serenity. Riba (1893-1959) ranks with Carner in importance. Riba, a professor of Greek, was a highly intellectual poet, yet his work is informed by a deep sensitivity to human concerns.

Foix (1893-1987) was the outstanding figure of twentieth-century Catalan literature. Many of his works defy categorization in traditional genres. His poetry is an extraordinary fusion of native Catalan elements with influences assimilated from the European avant-garde. He was particularly influenced by Surrealism and maintained a lifelong interest in the visual arts; his close association with Joan Miró and other painters in the post-World War I period had an important impact on his work.

Foix was a major force in introducing the European avant-garde to Barcelona and Catalonia through his extensive journalistic writing. Many of his poems have been immortalized in paintings of Salvador Dalí, Miró, Joan Ponç, and Antoni Tàpies, who recognized in him a kindred spirit. Foix regards the poet as an “investigator,” a “researcher,” whose medium is words. He is an anguished twentieth-century poet who combines the syntax and emotion of March with the vision of Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Dalí, and Miró.

Salvador Espriu

Salvador Espriu (1913-1985), author of La pell de brau (1960; The Bull-Hide, 1977) and El llibre de Sinera (1963; the book of Sinera), is perhaps the best-known modern Catalan poet—one of the few whose works are known outside Catalonia. Whereas Foix was a writer of “pure poetry,” Espriu was concerned with political actualities. Foix’s poems are sung in cathedrals by choirs, while Espriu’s are sung by the modern “troubadours” of popular music. His eclectic use of literary and cultural influences and his satiric wit contribute to his unique appeal.

Revival of interest

What is most significant about Catalan poetry is that it has been able to renew itself after a significant historical lacuna. In the 1980s, the Spanish government agreed to the demands of Catalan nationalists, supported by a majority of the Catalan-speaking populace, to make Catalan the official language of their region, and legislation since then, such as the Catalan Language Act of 1997, furthered those goals. Even though Spanish remains dominant, Catalan poets have continued to appear on the scene, including Maria Ángels Anglada (1930-1999), Miquel Martí i Pol (1929-2003), Marta Pessarrodona (b. 1941), Francesc Parcerisas (b. 1944), and Anna Crowe (b. 1945). Crowe published original works, such as Finding My Grandparents in the Peloponnese (2013), but also significantly contributed to the Catalan poetry genre by translating a number of works into English and other languages. Her 2007 work Light Off Water: XXV Catalan Poems, 1978-2002 is a collection of twenty-five poems, each by different poets, that demonstrate the transformation Catalan poetry experienced from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Crowe translated the works of Catalan poets, including Manuel Forcano’s "Maps of Desire" (2019), Andrea Clearfield's "Love is a Place" (2016), and Anna Crowe’s "Tugs in the Fog" (2006). Among Parcerisas's works are several poetry collections, including Seixanta-un poemes (2014) and Dos dies més de sud (2006).

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