Josep Carner, the best (also) in Spanish

According to what Ortega y Gasset told Josep Pla, and what the latter wrote in 1964 when Josep Carner was already old (he died in 1970), "The Catalan who has written best in Catalan of all time is José Carner"Carner in Spanish? Yes, of course. In fact, due to the circumstances of his exile, one of his most emblematic works, the great poem Nabi, The poem, consisting of 1,446 verses, was first published in Spanish in 1940. It was not a translation, but the author's own version, written while he was living in Mexico for six years before settling permanently in Brussels.

Now that Barcelona has been the guest city at the Guadalajara Book Fair, Jaume Coll has published a facsimile edition of that book. Nabi (without accent). Carner himself explains that in 1939 "Among these noble Mexican supporters, I translated my poem into the Castilian language, with the finesse of a more intimate conversation.". In the epilogue of the facsimile, Coll notes Carner's profound knowledge of Castilian Spanish: "He maintained a cordial, continuous, and selfless relationship with Spanish. His schooling, like that of any Catalan of his time, was solely in Spanish. And his first first steps Literary figures did not forget this language." However, from a very young age, at the end of the Renaixença, he chose as his literary language the one of his family and social environment: Catalan.

Born in 1884, an only child, his father was a journalist at the traditionalist and Carlist newspaper The Catalan Post and had edited the Catholic magazine The Golden AntYoung José showed an early aptitude for writing. Between the ages of 15 and 21, he won thirteen prizes at the Floral Games of Barcelona. By 18, he had already graduated in law, and by 20, in philosophy and literature, at which point (1904) he published his first book of poems. Book of Poets, and He begins to collaborate with the newspaper of conservative Catalan nationalism. The Voice of Cataloniain addition to directing the magazine Catalonia. With Tasty fruits (1906) marks the poetic blossoming of Novecentismo, which has in Eugeni d'Ors and his Glossary to The Voice of CataloniaInitiated that same year, his ideologue and inspiration.

From that moment on, Carner became Prat de la Riba's protégé and the undisputed leader of the new generation of poets. These were years of feverish literary production, combined with the translation of great works from English and French. In 1915 he married Carmen de Ossa, and in 1920, with Prat de la Riba having died three years earlier—and no one left to care for him—and seeing that despite his literary success he lacked a stable financial position, he entered the Spanish diplomatic corps.

Diplomatic life made him a man of many travels: Genoa, San José, Costa Rica, Le Havre, Hendaye, Beirut, Brussels, and Paris. He was one of the few career diplomats who remained loyal to the Republic during the Civil War. Franco's coup caught him in Lebanon, where just a few months earlier (October 1935) he had suffered the tragic and sudden death of his wife from a severe and fatal kidney stone on a hill far from the city. He was in Lebanon, however, the land of the mythical Jonah. NabiThere he found his definitive inspiration and began writing a magnum opus he had conceived in Hendaye, which he would finish in the autumn of 1938 in Paris, while serving as Minister Plenipotentiary, his last post. Before that, in Brussels, he had already met his future second wife, Émilie Noulet, an expert in French Symbolist poetry.

Like so many others, he went to Mexico, the only country that welcomed Republican exiles with open arms. He worked as a university professor and translator, and began translating his great biblical poem into Spanish. When it was published, he was 56 years old. Ten months later, in February 1941, the original Catalan version appeared in Argentina. The initial idea had been for both to be published simultaneously. "Anyone who reads the poem [in the Spanish version] will be surprised by the profound knowledge of Spanish displayed by its author, whose natural literary language was Catalan," Coll concludes.