Josep Maria Llompart: the man, the poet, and the civic icon

Great figures make history, but history also makes great figures. Josep Maria Llompart de la Peña (Palma, 1925-1993), descended on his father's side from a Mallorcan family that had adopted Castilian customs, and on his mother's side from a family of Castilian and Andalusian ancestry, with a military tradition, was raised and educated to be a man of order, a supporter of Franco, and a Castilian nationalist. In the end, through a mixture of personal rebellion, timely knowledge, and extreme historical circumstances, he became one of the most important writers in Catalan literature in Mallorca and the main civic-political icon of left-wing Mallorcan nationalism in the second half of the 20th century.

This unpredictable and exemplary evolution is what we are trying to unravel and explain. the researcher Pilar Arnau i Segarra in his biography, As long as I have a breath left. Josep Maria Llompart de la Peña: a multifaceted man at the service of the countryThis is a milestone in the commemoration of the centenary of the writer's birth, which is being celebrated this year. As the author acknowledges, hers is an eminently "popular" biography. This means that it primarily invents facts and presents data, narrates little—few anecdotes are detailed, and those that are are merely alluded to—and makes no speculation. It is a biography that is above all useful and valuable because it offers a wealth of information, because it distills and organizes the abundant existing bibliography, because it gathers testimonies from friends and colleagues who knew Llompart well, and because it articulates numerous statements by the subject about his life and work.

Structured not in a linear, narrative fashion, but rather thematically, by facets, and by periods—as appropriate—the biography provides a fairly comprehensive overview of both Llompart and the historical period in which he lived, although at times the reader may miss a deeper, more intimate, psychological, and historical-political exploration. Pilar Arnau deserves credit, in any case, for not omitting any aspect of either Llompart's life or his intellectual versatility.

From a Castilianized child, educated to become part of the system as a lawyer or notary, to a scholar, promoter, disseminator, and modernizer of Catalan literature; from a well-off and overprotected child to a leading figure committed to the causes of democracy, the Catalan Countries, social justice, and environmentalism: Llompart's trajectory could not be more dizzying.

Pilar Arnau touches on all the issues, in varying degrees of detail: parents and family environment; the connections between life and literature (some of Llompart's best poems are autobiographical); the most significant relationships, for example with Miquel Llodrà, the childhood friend who introduced him to Catalan culture, with Manuel Sanchis Guarner, or with the woman who would become his wife, Encarna Viñas, from a family of repressed Republicans; his work within the literary and cultural world (in the magazine Son Armadans Papers with Camilo José Cela and at Editorial Moll with Francesc de Borja Moll); his work as a historian and critic of Catalan literature and, in parallel, his poetic vocation as a creator and translator; his anti-Francoist and Catalan nationalist activism; his assumption of institutional responsibilities as president of the Obra Cultural Balear and the AELC; the awards and tributes...

The portrait that emerges from all this is that of a generous and courageous man who created a remarkable literary work and who, through his own merits and the particularities of the context, ended up acquiring an exceptional public dimension.