Jordi Llavina: "At my age, the only thing I can offer is a truth"

BarcelonaIt has been twenty years since Jordi Llavina (Gelida, 1968) debuted as a poet with La corda del gronxador (Moll, 2006). The author celebrates the anniversary by selecting his work in verse in El test de la flor malva, published by Pagès: the volume, 200 pages long and with a prologue by Pere Ballart, collects a representative sample of the ten poetry books he has published so far, including Vetlla (3i4, 2012), El magraner (Cossetània, 2020) and Un llum que crema (Proa, 2023).

Llavina, who balances teaching in a high school with literary criticism (in ARA, for example) and writing, arrives in Barcelona after a long day's work. Even so, he quickly forgets his fatigue as soon as he starts talking about his great passion: literature.

La corda del gronxador was your first book as a poet, but not your debut as an author. You had won the Josep Pla award in 2001 with Nitrato de Chile.

— It's a horrible novel.

It didn't seem that way to me, when I read it.

— It is infamous. Foul. Nefarious.

At that time you had already turned literature into your job: you presented the radio program Fum d'estampa on Catalunya Cultura, you wrote reviews in various media and a little later you presented, alongside Gaspar Hernández, the television program El book insígnia, which could be followed through more than 60 local stations.

— As an author, before Nitrato de Chile I had published the collection of short stories La mà tallada [Proa, 1999], which is a dispensable book but had some good ideas. All the stories had to do with hands and the problems that arose from them. Then I won, as you said, an important prize with Nitrato de Chile, but I disown that novel, which brought me many problems.

It was because of these problems that you started writing poetry?

— The disappointment I had with this novel allowed me to think that I could be reborn as a poet. I had always written poetry, and I had also read a lot of it. My mentality as an author is not very novelistic: it is harder for me to structure a story than to see things in the prospective detail of poetry. Although in recent years I have published prose books that are worthy, I am more "a student poet," as Espriu said, than a narrator.

The swing's rope arrived when you were approaching 40.

— It is an almost venerable age to publish poetry. I took my time because I like poetry books to have a structure and dominant pillars. With The Swing Rope they were the lure of the passage of time and memory.

The first poem we read in the anthology you are now presenting, The test of the mauve flower, describes the last dinner of a couple. Instead of starting by singing to a budding love, you sing to a love that is ending.

— It was a bit prophetic, this poem. Sometimes I've thought there's a kind of curse in how I live romantic relationships. When I'm enjoying them the most, I'm already incubating the end. I've loved and suffered a lot. I believe I've loved more than I've been loved. I continue to believe in love despite having experienced so many breakups. It's the force that moves the heavens and the stars, as Dante says.

In Vetlla you wrote that "love is an affection that expires".

— The idea of the end of love is very present in my poetry. It is an almost tragic component, as if it were determined by the gods, rather than dramatic. I am not a particularly sad person, but I am melancholic. It is true that sometimes I experience grief for things I have lost and I miss people I have loved... At the same time, I live life very intensely and with great freedom.

How do you put this freedom into practice?

— Getting up at five in the morning is an act of freedom. I leave home and walk through my town, Gelida, when it is still dark and there is no one in the street. Then I take the car and arrive in Vilafranca at half past six, and I still have an hour and a half to read before going to work.

You should sleep little.

— I'm going to sleep at eleven at the latest. I really like to follow a strict routine. Being able to read the newspaper before entering the trench of classes. Now I am documenting myself on Montserrat because it is the subject of one of the three commissioned books I am writing and, at the same time, I persist in reading the two volumes that Heidegger dedicated to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is a philosopher you revisit from time to time.

— It interests me because he is probably the most literary philosopher, the one who is easiest for us to turn to in order to disagree or agree with. Heidegger, for example, corrects him in its entirety.

The thing you do most is read, right?

— Yes. I read about four hours a day very well. I get irritated by people who say they don't have time to read. If you really like something, you make time for it from wherever you can.

Does the life you lead influence it?

— I've been living this same life for years. The last big change I made was leaving Vilafranca del Penedès and returning to Gelida, where I was born and grew up and where my parents still live. I'm very happy to have reconnected with them. We see each other practically every day. Now I watch Barça matches with my father, who is 84 years old. My mother is 80. She was born the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Why did you leave Vilafranca?

— Even though I feel like a Vilafranca resident, because I've spent almost three decades there – with a brief parenthesis in Barcelona, where I lived with Alba, the mother of my children – and everyone knows me, I was tired of my own life as I had focused it. It annoyed me a bit having to live in straitened circumstances. It seemed to me that the time had come to leave the apartment. It's absurd to live alone in a 100 square meter duplex. My children are already very grown up... I thought the time had come to downsize my life. That's why I moved to Gelida, to a 40 m² apartment.

Are you better?

— I think I have a better quality of life than before. I am happy living in a small apartment, without a sofa or TV, and getting up at five in the morning. Even though I spend seven hours a day at the institute, I can continue walking in the early morning and also in the afternoon, when I have finished working. While I walk, I also read.

In the mornings, when it's still dark, you can't.

— In the mornings I listen to podcasts in English.

You make such good use of your time that books have also been born from observations and discoveries during walks, such as Ermita (Meteora, 2017) and Proses de l'entreclaror (Gavarres, 2023).

— It comes out like this for me. I'm not looking for it.

Your poetry has often been fed by everyday events that you have lived or that you tell of others. In País de vent (Lleonard Muntaner, 2010) you dedicated a poem to the lice your children had caught and another to the molar that fell out of one of them: "A molar of my son, so ripe fruit, / first stone discarded / for the foundation of man", we read there.

— In poems, I distinguish very well between the pretext and the theme. The pretext, in the case of Queixal de nen, I have it very clear. We were in a restaurant with Guillem, after the presentation of Ningú ha escombrat les fulles [Amsterdam, 2008] and while we were eating skewers, one of his teeth fell out. Guillem was 12 or 13 years old, and now he is 30. The pretext was this: the theme of the poem was transmission, family continuity.

You dedicated El magraner (Cossetània, 2020) to your daughter Cesca.

— And The Ring [Meteora, 2021] I wrote it based on a trip I took to Paris with my friend Anna to see her. At that time she was doing a Master's degree there. With Cesca I have had a much closer relationship than with Guillem. We have spent hours and hours reading, because we have similar interests. She is the first reader of my books, along with Jordi Lara. The third is Marc Galofré, a philosophy graduate who is writing a thesis on Albert Camus.

Guillem also inspired the sonnet La badoquera, included in Contrada (3i4, 2013), which we can also read in El test de la flor malva.

— One day we were walking through a vineyard and found a special cane that he picked up and said: "Look, Dad, a badoquera". I had heard that word before, but it was as if I had forgotten it. My son brought it back to my attention. That badoquera, an instrument used to reach fruits on the highest branches of a tree, seemed like a perfect pretext for me to talk about literary style.

"He who has style, has a firm tool in his fist / to reach the place of strange fruit / as this reed did, in August!", the poem concludes.

— Sometimes we don't reach certain fruits, which are the sweetest –because they have "two more days of sun", as Rilke wrote–, and we have to use a ladder to reach them.

Your poetry is nourished by details of lived life but also builds stories, as happens in Vetlla, L'ermita and L'anell. In some cases, as in Un matrimoni, included in Diari d'un setembrista (Bromera, 2008) it seems that you even want to create a fable from the life of a man who is a gravedigger and his wife, who is a midwife.

— It's curious, because A marriage is born from an anecdote related to my daughter Cesca. When she was 4 years old, she asked me: what would happen if in a marriage the woman were a midwife and the father were an undertaker? It disconcerted me, and I started to think about it. The midwife helps to ease the passage into life and the undertaker places the body of a corpse in a hole or wherever. If one and the other love each other, nothing should happen.

Vetlla was your first long narrative poem: 1,302 octosyllables that told the memory of a lost youthful love. "(...) What weighs more: / the love you feel or the pile of ashes / into which it begins to turn?", the lyrical self asks in the book.

— The elegy is, probably, the main string of my poetry. There are very different elegiac visions: Goethe's are luminous; Machado's, on the other hand, are dark, because they speak of the death of his wife. In my case, I am an elegiac in every sense of the word, but I do not lose hope of ceasing to be so one day, not out of necessity or by medical prescription, but because I am aware that the motives and stimuli for living are unlimited.

The poem that gives this anthology its title, The test of the mauve flower, reminds us of the lament and grief for someone who is no longer here.

— Whenever friends, lovers, or people I cared about have come to my house, they have tried to convince me of the moral necessity of having plants. Helena managed to make my terrace look very beautiful. We went to a nursery and bought a juniper, a mallow flower, and various aromatic plants... Later, Laia, when I no longer had plants, suggested turning the terrace into a chill-out space. Just like Helena's small garden, Laia's chill-out ended up dying from inaction, because I didn't take care of it enough.

Even so, nature is very present in your poetry.

— I like to integrate it into what I write. There is a Christmas poem, Advent, in which I talk about bringing the forest into the house through the nativity scene. Many authors I have followed with devotion, including Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur and Theodore Roethke, treat nature as a constant, almost spiritual presence.

More recently, in Herboritzar de cor, included in Un llum que crema –a book with which you won the Carles Riba prize–, you explain how your view of nature changes from the moment you are able to name it.

— During the first few years I walked, I didn't know the names of most flowers, herbs, and trees. A friend of mine, Oriol Sabaté, introduced me to an application, Google Lens, and since then I spent a while pointing at everything I saw to name it. People must have thought I had gone even a bit crazier than I already was.

The test of the mauve flower ends with an unpublished poem written during the past year, Orange Tree Street.

— It is part of my new, as yet unpublished, book, titled The Wounded Voice. It is structured around two losses: that of a love and that of one of my best friends, Àlex Susanna.

In Carrer dels tarongers you link the moment you met, in the late 80s, when you were a summer postman in Gelida, and a meeting a few days before his death.

— I needed to recover the figure of the friend through the beginning of our relationship and almost the end. Five days before he died, he told me: "We talk little about death." It struck me deeply because he was right. We talk little about the mystery of death. That's why the poem becomes a kind of mantra on this subject.

You regret that you didn't know what to tell him, then.

— I didn't know what to say to him because he was dying. We all knew that Àlex had his days numbered.

In the final stretch of the poem we read: "To write is to flay". You are not referring to flaying an animal, but to "removing excess layers" from an oak tree. Why?

— We write to try to reach the heart of reality. On Saint George's Day, I was given a very beautiful rose, without frills. I have left it in a vase for the last few weeks and have been portraying it during the aging process. It has already lost all its leaves, but the corolla still holds. I think the rose now is much more real than the splendor of young beauty. It has stayed on the stem, it no longer has leaves, which became stained as they aged... My rose will soon lose its head. When you are young, you tend to use many resources that invite you to think that somehow they will make you admirable. At my age, the only thing I can offer is a truth. Perhaps it will not be a beautiful portrait and it is uncomfortable, but this essence is what I have left.