Clementina Arderiu, a poet in backlight

Barcelona"Clementina Arderiu Voltas is probably one of the Catalan writers who has had the easiest and most difficult time leaving a work in the history of Catalan literature." With this forceful statement begins the profile that Marta Pessarrodona outlined the poet in the volume Donasses. Protagonists of modern Catalonia (Destination, 2006). Now that the fiftieth anniversary of Arderiu's death is being celebrated, it is worth asking what the reasons are for this contradictory situation – in the light and in the shadow at the same time – and trying to rectify the wrong done to his work, on which reductive judgments have weighed, for social and biographical reasons.

Clementina Arderiu was a poet. It is interesting to present her as such because, despite having a very interrupted creative life – marked by long periods of silence attributable to the war, exile, and postwar, on the one hand, and raising her children, on the other – the celebration of song and ballad is a recurring theme in her work, a pillar of self-affirmation in a poetics that is more inclined towards doubt. "Fidelity I will always find / to my own singing," she asserts with a sure stroke in the poem "Always and now, the composition that concludes the homonymous volume. His poetic production, although it was quite brief – he published six books in more than half a century – is compact, personal, and very well constructed, made of verses of apparent simplicity and accessible language that, however, say "much more than they appear at first glance" – as stated in "D. Sam Abrams to the prologue of I was in the corner, the complete works of the poet that he himself has curated and that Edicions 62 has reissued, expanded and corrected, this February.

"Oh, Carrer de la Princesa, / before I entered myself!"

Born in Barcelona on July 6, 1889, and died on February 17, 1976, Clementina Arderiu was born into a family of silversmiths, but she refused to continue the family trade to dedicate herself to art. She learned the craft and worked in it as a young woman, while studying languages and piano at the Municipal School of Music. She recalls these years of training in Barcelona's Born district in a delicate poem of old age, dated 1963: "On Princesa Street / –cinnamon, cloves, and anise– / I still smelled the scent / that my fifteen years harvested. / On Princesa Street, / the street of my sighs. / Oh, Princesa Street, / before I came into myself!"

She published her first poems at the end of the first decade of the century, and in 1912 she won the Flor Natural at the Floral Games of the Barcelona hiking group Déu i Pàtria with the poem A un llibre oblidat – fifteen years after Caterina Albert won the Floral Games of Olot with the poem Caterina Albert won the Floral Games of Olot with the poem Lo llibre nou, with a concomitant bookish theme, and with the verse monologue La infanticida, which unleashed the scandal from which she adopted the pseudonym Víctor Català. In the valuable interview that Montserrat Roig conducted with Arderiu for Serra d’Or in 1972, the poet recalls the day of the award ceremony: "They told me: 'The president will be a very talented university student.'" Thus began her acquaintance with Carles Riba, whom she married, despite family opposition, four years later. And thus, too, is the reason for the subdued reception of her work: marriage to one of the greatest intellectuals of 20th-century Catalan culture, which undoubtedly facilitated Arderiu's poetic cultivation and must have uniquely illuminated her path of reading and writing, but which, at the same time, due to the decisive weight of his figure in the (re)construction of the country's literature, eclipsed Arderiu's verses and relegated the woman to a secondary role – that of the attentive wife who occasionally cultivates letters as a decorous pastime for a lady of the house.

Caterina Riba Sanmartí, granddaughter of poets and one of the foremost scholars of feminine poetic genealogy in Catalan, speaks of it in terms of cryptogyny, that is, the systematic invisibility of women in culture. Proof of this situation in relation to Arderiu is the fact that throughout the forty-six pages that constitute Riba's portrait by Josep Pla in the first series of "Homenots" –a book that Pessarrodona attempts to balance, some fifty years later, precisely with the "Donasses" we mentioned at the beginning–, not a single mention is made of the figure of his wife. It has often been emphasized that Arderiu's poetry draws little from her husband's and, on the contrary, is much more indebted to Josep Carner –and it must be said that seeking male references to account for a woman's artistic exceptionality is an exercise not without certain mystifying tics, too–; it seems that the possibility of Arderiu influencing Riba's work in some way, however, is an extravagance that neither Pla nor anyone else has yet considered. Taking advantage of the anniversary of the poet's death, we would do well to ask ourselves, however, whether Riba's songs of the fifties do not contain more than one powerful Arderiu influence. Due to the doubling with the wondrous childhood self and the specific rhythmic and musical resources employed, Riba's poem "Dins la nit, els meus anys… could be a good example of this influence.

"Two lives are in me"

Maria-Mercè Marçal wanted to dedicate her doctoral thesis to Arderiu's work; she did not finally undertake the task, but she did prepare and publish the Arderiu anthology Contraclaror (La Sal, 1985), with a very valuable preface that has marked a change of direction in the attention and approach – rather scarce, it must be said – to her poetry that subsequent generations have given. In this insightful text, Marçal insists on the idea of the vital contradiction in which Arderiu found herself, a singularly intelligent and creative woman who was forced, by social and era conditioning, to choose – "to choose consciously, which does not mean freely", Marçal precisely states with lucidity – a life model "of a woman like others, like so many others" – as Arderiu is quick to emphasize in the text that heads the collection of poems from 1936. And that this woman strives to submit herself to a feminine ideal that constrains and restricts her.

Surely, however, it has been the reviews of Arderiu's first two volumes of verse, Cançons i elegies (1916) and L’alta llibertat (1920), that have most determined the general idea of her poetry that we readers have formed. Especially significant, in this regard, is the one Joaquim Folguera wrote about her first book, published in Les noves valors de la literatura catalana: «Clementina Arderiu's work is a most pure case of literary emotion: elegiac without weakness, joyous without explosion, pious without disturbance. It reveals the perfect model of the Catalan woman who laments little, loves quietly, spreads joy in a smile, and asks for virtue at the price "of pain in all its breadth"».

As Marçal already pointed out, rather than speaking about Arderiu's first volume, Folguera seems to be speaking about the model of femininity proposed in his eyes – a model with which Arderiu must have agreed wholeheartedly. Thus, the tracking of the presumed marks of an ideal woman who seems to need to be defined or reduced to a still essence is a constant in the reviews of Arderiu's first books, needless to say always made by men. "Woman, mother, vigilant eye, provident right hand, who does not forget to remain, at times, strangely indolent, strangely unbridled, capable of revealing, like a pythoness, magnificent and terrible arcana, or of whispering in the ear of the storm the feeble things that she would not dare to say to anyone," points out Josep Carner with a mystifying halo in the article "La dolça consirosa," from 1921; "it is an indefinable poetry, perhaps, so feminine," concludes Josep Maria Capdevila in a review from 1927.

Beyond discretion and subtlety

As can be seen from the critiques of the early twentieth century, then, this exemplary femininity finds its maximum expression in Arderiu's verse in the ideal of good sense and restraint. Thus, it has been emphasized many times that discretion and subtlety – as counterpoints, it is understood, to the male prototype, with his broad and theatrical gestures – are the two main virtues that emerge from her verses, in an edifying reading exercise that aims, more than to describe Arderiu's poetry, to propose it as an example of the ideal woman and to reaffirm the stereotyped notion of what women can or should write. Anthologies and academic curricula have also contributed to this, as when they have focused on Arderiu's poetry, it has been to almost always select the same poems, those that underpin this same image. Let us take as an example of this what is, for sure, one of Arderiu's best-known compositions, El nom: "Clementina is my name, / Clementina they used to call me. // In another time I was / a little fearful; / my name was long / like a complaint / and it stung my heart / when my little friends / to annoy me / often reproached me for it". Thus begins the song, and from this onomastic discordance the verses move to a happy identity settlement by the grace and work of the male figure: "No name is so beautiful / on earth / as the one my beloved / sings to me in my ear", she concludes.

As Maria-Mercè Marçal and Caterina Riba Sanmartí have insisted on emphasizing, however, in this approach to Arderiu's poetry the focus is decentered. Without denying that there are poems that reinforce this better-known vision of the poet, the truth is that there are many others that, in inverse proportion to the effort of containment so pleasing to Noucentista criticism, explore the failure of this will to control. Indeed, within Arderiu seethed what she herself calls "dark things": these are the contained, for example, within the chamber that she feels is "at the very bottom" of herself, where even for "a few seconds" neither her husband nor she herself could enter, because "the uproar would strike / more than a stone," as she expresses it in the Cançó de la bella confiança. Thus, a good part of her poems deal with the internal struggle to silence these dark voices, with the desire for rectitude in the face of the assaults that seek to bend her: "Because I feel that a no / that came to me from you through the air / would break this will / that is strong but not very much so," she asks of a sea laden with ambiguous desires in the poem Imprecació.

And it is here where Arderiu's poetry becomes more interesting, complex, and current to us, where she speaks to us more directly and is capable of exploring themes as in vogue as the ambivalence of desire (for example, in the johnbergerian game of glances in Veí que sotja) or split identity (as explored in the magnificent Cançó del voler i del no voler, in which the elusive self only settles in doubt, in the possibility that does not lean towards either of the two options that open up before it), or as unusual for her time as childbirth (recreated as a dangerous and solitary ascent, culminating in a great leap and with "only Death as neighbor / who sifts me with a thousand sieves"). May the fiftieth anniversary of her passing, then, serve to bring out from the shadows verses that explore, with singular musicality and with intelligence and poetic intuition, the complexity of human identity.