Pere Gimferrer: making life a poem

At the age of 14, Pere Gimferrer discovered the existence of Cahiers du Cinéma , and he developed the illusion that he was a French boy from the provinces, who bought the Cahiers every month to learn about life and get ahead. That adolescent turns eighty this June 22nd, and his work demonstrates, as Octavio Paz told him, that he is still a young poet. Trying to summarize the fundamental role that his books play for many generations of readers is no easy task. Let everyone explore Gimferrer's vast bibliography and let themselves be carried away; the result will not disappoint, whether you choose a volume on painting, a literary essay, a book of poems, or his highly edited Cine y literatura . Pere Gimferrer is an unavoidable reference who, with a passion for words, executes his own ongoing revolution: turning life into a poem.

If you weren't doing this interview now, what would you be doing?

I'd be at the publishing house where I go regularly again. I've never stopped working, but I've been away for a few months for two different reasons: sick leave and the completion of some complicated projects that particularly affected the floor I'm on.

Surrounded by books, I can't help but ask him, what are you reading?

I'm not reading any specific book today, I'm just thinking about which one I'll read. Anyway, I recently finished rereading a few books: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and St. Augustine's Confessions .

You're not one of those who writes every day, but do you have something in the works?

I'm finishing writing a long composition, although I don't know yet if it'll be worth it. There are poets from Neruda to Brossa, for example, who wrote every day, but I've never done it. Brossa said he had to work every day like a bricklayer. And you know that anecdote about when he went to renew his ID and they asked him his profession, and he said poet, they understood "painter," and he said "painter," yes, yes. But I don't write every day.

And would you like to share any details about this long composition?

No, it's still too early.

On more than one occasion he has said that he accepts that his poems are not easily understood.

My verses always have a more poetic than logical meaning, existing through sound and then partly through semantics. Logical meaning exists, but it doesn't preexist. Poetry is made with words, not ideas.

Of your poetry collections, which one are you most satisfied with?

It's hard for me to say. I'm a poor reader of my poems. While I'm writing them and shortly afterward, I reread them, but with the goal of seeing if I need to make any changes or modifications. Once published, it's very rare that I reread my poems or prose.

Come on, no title will stand out. Maybe 'L'espai desert' or 'Rhapsody'…

L'espai desert , yes! and others. When I need to publish them, it means I'm happy with them. But then, over time, I no longer have a firm opinion. There's a lot of what I wrote that I didn't publish.

Where is the unpublished material?

Some of what I don't publish is in the form of handwritten text that's difficult to read except for me, because I've never stopped writing by hand. For a relatively long time, I used to write on an Olivetti, but that was a very specific phase, and I went back to writing by hand.

What answers has poetry given you?

Me?

Yes, you pose many questions in the form of powerful images that are often flashbulbs that shake the reader, if I may say so.

Poetry doesn't have to answer anything to me. Poetry, on the one hand, stops a moment in time, and on the other, analyzes it. By breaking it down almost prismatically, the moment becomes something else; it's the moment of the poem. Poetry is a retention of things that can only be expressed by stopping time.

On the day he was awarded an honorary doctorate, in the Laude dedicated to him, Jordi Marrugat told him, among many other things, that you are a bridge of dialogue between literary traditions.

I'm a person who has always had a great capacity to absorb and perhaps process very different things, not just literature, but also cinema and painting.

I'll ask you about painting shortly, but first, let's talk about your work as an editor at Seix Barral. One of the first writers you published was a friend of yours, Eduardo Mendoza. Do you remember the first thing he let you read?

The first thing I read wasn't a novel; it was much earlier. Eduardo was a couple of years ahead of me in law school. And one day, I think it was at a bar, he showed me something I remember well. It was called "My Toys ." It was a sarcastic prose piece, like a kind of cruel toy with a lot of dark humor.

And have you already guessed Mendoza's talent?

I have the idea that in literature, painting, film, or anything else, you either get to it right away or you won't connect. That is, if you notice something at the beginning, you'll notice it the rest of the time. I'm firmly convinced of this. Either you're interested in it the first time, or you won't be, and vice versa, if there's something you grasp, you quickly understand whether it's going to enter your world in some way or not. And with Eduardo, I realized after just a few pages that I liked it.

Aside from Eduardo Mendoza, who have you enjoyed editing?

To quite a few and of all kinds, but in narrative to Muñoz Molina, Julio Llamazares, Isaac Rosa, Roberto Bolaño, of whom I published not his first book, nor by any means the most famous, but one that interests me: Nazi Literature in America .

I imagine you can't tell too many details about the workings of literary prizes...

I'll tell you something curious because its protagonist has already told it. In one of the Catalan poetry prizes for which I've been a judge for many years, for a time, the award was vacant because a member of the jury, Narcís Comadira, argued very well for it to be that way, until someone from the organization spoke to him to change that. Then there's the issue of pseudonyms: when they exist, someone may know who this or that pseudonym is, although more than pressure, the fact that knowing the identity can change behavior. It has also happened that some important authors haven't received an award because, not knowing the identity, they might not be awarded, or vice versa. But this, more than pressure, is information that can change interpretations.

Let's change the subject. How do you see the current political landscape?

The political landscape has never been very stimulating for me. I remember once writing to Valens, a very rigorous man, that he believed the illusion created during the transition was false and illusory because there can be no harvest when everything has been tossed and swept away. Often, when talking about current events, I rely on ancient sources, like Cicero's letters.

And how do you interpret nationalism?

Any nationalism is a cultural projection. This is evident, and there's a book, Mater dolorosa by José Álvarez Junco, that delves deeply into the topic.

⁄ “I have enjoyed editing Eduardo Mendoza, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Julio Llamazares and Roberto Bolaño”

You are a member of the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) and the Academia de las Buenas Letras (Academy of Fine Letters), among others. What role do these institutions play in our time?

It's not always the same and has varied within each corporation and each area. I, for example, have little contact with the new grammar of the Spanish language, although I appreciate its main coordinator, Ignacio Bosque. And when it comes to Catalan regulations, I still prefer to read Pompeu Fabra. What else are they good for? Although it may seem strange, for dictionaries, because there are still many people who refer to some academic dictionary, the thing is that even in this respect, Bones Lletres hasn't always followed the same example as the Institut d'Estudis Catalans...

Are you in favor of accepting Luis Alberto de Cuenca's entry into the RAE?

I don't mind saying I voted for him.

Looking back at his essays on painting, it is inevitable to mention the names of Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies.

I met Tàpies a lot. As a person, he was very interesting, and we didn't always talk about painting. He was very interested in talking about other things, like certain books, and he was also interested in cinema. He was very interested in poetry, which is the closest thing to painting or cinema, because it doesn't depend on telling you something, but rather on whether it is one thing or another.

And the deal with Joan Miró?

In collaboration with Miró, I created a single, but very special, book, Lapidari, from 1981. We were at the Maeght gallery in Barcelona, ​​and I told him I'd just received a book from England about stones. And Miró clicked his tongue, the sound that indicated he'd liked the idea. Miró wasn't a big talker, although I did have many conversations with him, some quite detailed, when I was studying the objects in the Miró Foundation. I later wrote several books about his work.

How do you cope with the loss and absence of your loved ones?

This is taking its turn, and it doesn't just happen to me, it happens to everyone. There's a poem by Cernuda from when Gide died, a poem that doesn't reflect my thoughts, but it does reflect his, saying to himself, "How few men you have left to admire." I don't say that much either.

I know you don't want to talk too much about your eightieth birthday, but how do you approach this stage of your life?

I'm not tackling anything. For now, I'm limiting myself to writing an unpublished text that's been read by almost no one, practically no one.

⁄ “Miró wasn’t much of a talker, although I did have many conversations with him, some of them quite detailed.”

Octavio Paz called you a young poet. Do you still feel that way?

He told me that I would always be a young poet, even if I wasn't a young person. He said this in a letter to me; he wrote that there are poets who are always young, like Apollinaire and perhaps García Lorca, and others who are always old, like Elliot, whom he liked very much.

Still don't want to feel like an adult?

I agree with this in a way. Poetry, like painting, responds to a world that is, in some ways, distinct from the adult world. Someone who died recently, and with whom I never got along very well, said that we all pretend to be adults. And perhaps we all do pretend to be adults.

To finish, and connect it with adult duties, what routine awaits you at the office?

Now I'm in a new office where everything is the same as it was in the old one. It means that on a shelf, they're all the same books and in the same order. My routine basically consists of reading, and that's something I've always done both inside and outside my office.

The work A repertoire of masks

The work of Pere Gimferrer (Barcelona, ​​1945) spans several genres (essay, translation, diaries), although poetry constitutes his backbone, the genre that focused his artistic activity and intellectual speculation from the beginning. In 1963 he published Mensaje del tetrarca (Message from the Tetrarch). Later, Arde el mar (The Sea is Burning) (1963-65), and, above all, La muerte en Beverly Hills (Death in Beverly Hills) (1967), shook up the poetic Spain of the 1960s, largely cooked in the vapors of social realism. The author's distinctive voice was already evident, along with his hallucinatory images and metaphors, which seem to reconcile the gold and black of the Baroque with the blues of surrealism. Els miralls (The Miralls) (1970) is the book in which he changes language (his name, Pedro, also becomes Pere). Some words from Arthur Terry about Hora foscant (1972) could be applied to many other passages in his lyrical work: “The active forces of the universe, which we can only glimpse in a fragmentary and metaphorical way, are directly related to the transformative power of language.” With words, the poet aims to encompass everything, to reflect on everything within our reach but also on what we can barely sense. “La fulguració de l'esser” is an image of his: the poet echoes it. As he will also echo the “sot de l'esser,” the “space without light or darkness,” “the space that is all space.” What is a man? The poet does not shy away from asking this question, nor from trying to answer it. Canto V of L'espai desert – a book of authentic philosophical ambition, published in 1977 –, between biblical and Eliotian reminiscence, speculates about our temporality (and, therefore, about our mortality): “Els morts / viuen el temps etern i nocturn de la boira, / l'instant que és tots els temps. És el temps del desig / i el de la passió, el times to remember / and the times to sleep. The vapors of the calitja / and a smoke filled with greenery / daylight on our somnis: rain, / with the flames on a summer night. Dreams fall far away, but the illumination of loss is given. Time and death form the theme that articulates Marinejant (2016), a work dedicated to the grandfather who made him read Stendhal: “any de traspàs són tots els nostres anys.” In the notes I took while reading it, I revived an idea from Gaston Bachelard, which seems to me to fit very precisely with the subject matter of that and other books by the author. The Gallic thinker defends that “the intellectual criticism of poetry will never lead to the core in which poetic images are formed.” Desire makes known “l'instant etern de la immortalitat,” although, as he asserts in one of his final poems, this eternal instant can be both of immortality and of mortality. A contrapavesian verse by Per Riguardo suggested addressing death in the eyes of the eye: “Dare del tu agli occhi della morte.” In a 1998 text titled L'agent provocador (The Provocateur) – a sort of prose counterpart to the poem Masquerade , published two years earlier – Pere Gimferrer confessed that “with Desert Space and with Apparitions , I said everything I could say about my mate […] through half of poetry.” It wasn’t a joke: Gimferrer doesn’t usually use them. But I get the impression that, evaluating his later work, it was a hasty justification: new titles by the author were going to reveal, I don’t know if new facets of his conscience and sensitivity, but at least a deeper exploration of subjects previously discussed. In the title provided, we read, with reference to Rimbaud: “He fascinates me above all because he touches on the riba, with language that stops designating and says itself.” Here, in my opinion, is the cornerstone of all Gimferrerian lyric poetry, of his admirable corpus in Spanish and Catalan (and in Italian: let us not forget the poetry collection Per riguardo , from 2014): the great theme of his work—and the first achievement of the Barcelona native’s strict poetic commitment—is language that “stops designating and says itself.” And now that I mentioned the poet of Illuminations : in the lecture Rimbaud and Us (2005), Gimferrer maintained that “as an adolescent, he trusts that words can transform life.” We can relate the Barcelona native to many poets of the Western tradition (Góngora, Eliot, Stevens...), but, in this comparative exercise, Rimbaud takes the cake: in both authors, language looks at itself, it recognizes in itself the transcendent foundation. Poetry of great plasticity, very visualizable, if I may use the word: the poet confessed to me one day that this was due to the influence of João Cabral de Melo. The privileged color of Gimferrer’s verses is red (in a beautiful verse from El castell de la puresa (2014), he compared life to “a red toilet filled with blood.”) No poet has followed with such diligence the advice of Vincenzo Cardarelli, who wrote that poetry, “like tragedy, is the art of masking.” Language, he said, and lyrical substance, which he so admirably developed in two major collections of poems: El vendaval (1988) and La llum (1991). In a marvelous couplet, the poet defined poetic art this way: “Something more than the do of synthesis: / see in the light the transit of the light.” Language too. In the case of the Catalan, what a profound homage he paid to it with El castell de la puresa , a title indebted to Mallarmé (as was, also, L'espai desert , which the author perfectly fills with writing or drawing)! It is a homage through the rich Catalan tradition: “Del cel del segle quinze venen els mots d'uns versos”. And love, of course, that Gimferrer has painted with an extreme palette: from that “silent beauty” of Arde el mar to whom the poet cried out to save him from dying, passing through the long love poem of La muerte en Beverly Hills , the passionate story described in Amor en vilo , from 2006 (and in its prose counterpart, Interludio azul, from the same year), until reaching the lovers' battle in the iconic Masquerade : “l'amor és un vals d'estocades”. Love and corporality, which he has represented in exquisite detail (as if denying a verse from No en mis días (2016), which says “that which will never say a word”). “Be silent: it is my heart”: thus ended a poem from Extraña fruta (1968), which seems to heir to the wise admonitions of his teacher Vicente Aleixandre. Fortunately, that heart—which turns eighty this June—does not fall silent in the author’s latest titles. And it does not stop beating. May it continue to do so in its unmistakable expression!