Pedrolo's first political essay comes out: "There's a Catalonia that's in the way."

BarcelonaManuel de Pedrolo (l'Aranyó, 1918 – Barcelona, ​​​​1990) tried to get his first and only political essay, entitled, through censorship three times. Letters from CataloniaAll three times, the censors rejected him. The writer displayed, in the judges' words, a "definitely separatist character" and presented a text they considered "political propaganda with particular violence." It was the summer of 1966, a time when the Franco dictatorship was experiencing a certain degree of openness, but even so, the state apparatus did not yield to Pedrolo's demands. Letters from Catalonia It was forgotten in a drawer until, six decades later, the publishing house Comanegra unearthed it from the writer's archive. The essay now sees the light of day in an anthology entitled Combat prose, which is part of the collection Authorships and which also includes about forty articles by Pedrolo published between 1964 and 1988, some of which are also unpublished.

What does it have? Letters from Catalonia What made Franco's censors wrinkle their noses? "The book was born in the face of a Franco regime that had shown some signs of laxity toward the Catalan question," explains Comanegra's editorial director, Jordi Puig. It was a time when Catalan publishing houses such as Edicions 62 were opening up, and great names in Catalan literature such as Mercè Rodoreda, Joan Sales, and Aurora Bertrana had already returned from exile. Against this backdrop, Pedrolo reviews the conflict between Catalonia and Spain and adds a touch of hope. "There is a Catalonia that is annoying, let us not be afraid to say it; it has been for centuries, and that is why it has been flattered or threatened, depending on the circumstances," Pedrolo writes. "Flattery has been able to win over a few people [...]; threats have led to a hardened retreat. We know that what is necessary is something else, that there is a third way: that of justice."

The writer's perspective on the situation in Catalonia was not just a flash in the pan that summer. For decades, Pedrolo consolidated his tenacious and combative Catalanism, which translated into hundreds of articles in publications such asToday, Canigou and Sierra de OroIn one of them, also unpublished and rejected by censorship, the author of the Second origin typescript (1974) refuted the idea of the other Catalans, forged by Paco Candel two years after the book's publication. "Pedrolo completely amends the prevailing view, the idea that there was a society that should be considered Catalan equally, regardless of its integration process," Puig notes.

Language, the great battle horse

"He argued that Catalonia is an open society and that there are no limits to being considered Catalan, as long as we establish minimum common denominators regarding language and cultural integration," the editor states. In fact, Pedrolo made Catalan one of his main themes. In 1980, the writer published a scathing critique of Nazario González, then dean of the Faculty of Information Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​for refusing to speak Catalan in public. "A nation is either completely or not at all, and if it is, it has rights that it cannot jeopardize or allow to be threatened by those who, in their land, had and continue to have the supervening community, which is now no longer in its territory, although it does not need to present a passport at any customs, and must respect the laws," he wrote. "From his point of view, if someone lives in Catalonia but has no contact with the language, they can in no way be considered Catalan," says Puig.

One of the objectives of this new anthology is to put Pedrolo's political thought back into circulation, since the volumes collected in the articles are out of print. Júlia Ojeda, a doctor in Catalan literature and professor at the University of the Balearic Islands, was in charge of making the selection and writing the prologue. "We have chosen those articles that are absolutely connected to the contemporary debates in the country. Pedrolo had three fundamental axes: language, demographics, and the national discourse," says Ojeda, who also claims him as a reference in postcolonialism. "If we were an American university, we would have already incorporated him as such," he adds.

A cornered thinker

Pedrolo wrote Letters from Catalonia in one of his best professional moments. He had just published Foul play (1965), which became one of his most widely read books, and he had already established himself as one of the best-known authors in the country. "He was someone deeply popular, with many readers who not only read him but also wrote him letters. He responded to them all," highlights historian Teresa Ibars, who since last January has been tasked with organizing and categorizing the writer's archive, located in the Espai Pedrolo del Castell de Concabella. However, Pedrolo's fame did not correspond with institutional recognition or that of the intellectual elite of the time. "There was a whole political interest in hiding him. He was a figure who took a straight line on the issue of independence and who was deeply disappointed with the policies of the first years of democracy," notes Ibars, who signs the epilogue of Combat prose.

This exile pushed the writer toward increasingly bitter opinion pieces. "He hasn't backed down in 25 years, and this is precisely one of the criticisms leveled at him: he's been told he's entrenched, that the country is changing," Puig points out. "Read through today's eyes, everything hurts, because his articles have many premonitory elements. They were a warning, but they ignored them." In this sense, Ojeda recalls that his adversaries "criticized him because he always wrote the same article, but it was true: he always wrote about language, the Catalan Countries, and the political outlook in relation to Spain." Ojeda explains that Pedrolo was sidelined "because Pujolism couldn't absorb his discourse," so now the prologuist is calling for his rescue: "Beyond having him in the Olympus of the most popular authors of all time, he was a political essayist we need to keep the public conversation going today." I was always thinking and writing.