I present to you the Catalan Tolkien
BarcelonaThis summer, which many of us have seen as fire ravaged our forests and we are not entirely sure if what we are experiencing is nature becoming unbalanced or, on the contrary, doing its utmost to rebalance itself; this summer, Editorial Barcino has published a new edition of Liliana, by Apel·les Mestres (Barcelona, 1854-1936), and has given us the opportunity to re-evaluate a writer whom we should all know better. Personally, I would swear I had never read anything by him, although I had seen illustrations by him at the MNAC. I delved into his life a few months ago when I was preparing the script for a podcast about classic authors that I present, The back cover. And since then I have been amazed not only by her pen, but also by all that she did well: drawing, painting, writing poetry, theatre, prose and music, translating and giving graphic illustration the artistic category it deserves.
Mestres was a total artist who, moreover, was passionate about nature, botany and gardening. I could tell you how I was fascinated by the texts of The old house (1912), the book where he recounts his childhood in a Barcelona that was just beginning to expand beyond its walls. He, a sensitive and imaginative child born in Plaça Felip Neri, began to let his imagination soar with the monsters of the cathedral: “I used to go in and out of the cathedral at all hours. Corridors and spiral staircases, crypt and tombs, chapels and galleries, roofs and bell towers, I knew everything stone by stone and I became so familiar with that mysterious grandeur, that solemn stillness, those dragons that watched me from capitals and gargoyles, that I often held real conversations with them, and I am sure that more than one of the ballads I wrote twenty years later were told to me by those monsters, those devils, those bells”.
Liliana (1907) is a beautiful and very lyrical narrative poem that speaks to us, precisely, about the fragility of the wholeness of our world and about the inevitability of dualities; that there is no good without evil, love without hate or beauty without pain, and that nature lives in balance as long as all these feelings humane don't get discouraged.
The first thing that fascinated me about Liliana was the number of elements it had in common with The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. In this column, we value Tolkien as a first-class author, capable of creating his own worlds and languages, moving man away from the center of the world, and speaking to us of a nature with its own voice, powerful, full, struggling, and suffering. Apel·les Mestres (1854-1936) and Tolkien (1892-1973) have in common that they resort to fantasy to reflect on basic philosophical themes, such as the clash between good and evil. And not only do they do so wonderfully, but they draw from a romanticism that leads them to share the same type of characters and treatment of folklore and nature that makes their works seem like a fable or an ancient legend.
Thus, Liliana begins with the first abuse a man inflicted on a tree: asking it for help to create an axe and then using it to harm it. In this prologue (the work is structured in songs, not chapters), the trees lift their roots from the ground and begin to walk. If this already has an exact parallel with The Lord of the Rings, you should know that, in addition, the Barcino edition includes Mestres' original illustrations, and these directly recall the ents from the film. In Liliana, the main protagonists are the dwarves, who, like in Tolkien, were miners: “Active and hard workers, they didn’t take long / to enlarge the burrows and delve deeper and deeper / and they worked so much in the heart of the Earth / that they became, without thinking, miners,” recounts the Catalan.
Dwarves who lose their way
Although if Flok, Mik, and Puk, the three dwarves protagonists of Mestres' work, were characters from The Lord of the Rings, they would be innocent, wise, tender hobbits, but also brave and adventurous, and willing to risk themselves: “The most prudent Flok, Mik, the intrepid leader / and Puk, the tender Puk, exquisite dreamer, / always together and in agreement (three spirits, three bodies) / seemed to form only one body and one spirit”. The spider is also a character shared by both authors, and which the Barcelonian uses to talk about the paradox of causing harm when you try to do good.
Tolkien and Apel·les share archetypes, although each builds different stories. Liliana is a work that feels short and we wish Mestres hadn't resolved it so quickly. And in the middle of the work there is, of course, Liliana, a nymph who personifies purity (“What is fear? / Believing in evil? I don't believe it… The Earth is beautiful; / and what is beautiful, is it not good?”) and who makes the dwarves lose their way and rethink their lives from top to bottom: “We thought / we knew everything, as you say; thus we thought… / Today we see very clearly that we were mistaken. / Today… we know nothing; today… we would believe / that you are the one who knows everything, and we would swear it”. But beauty is ephemeral and generates a painful disappointment in the little protagonists, who only win when they have to mobilize for the homeland, the forest, threatened once again by humans. But I can't go on much longer, and we could talk about Liliana for hours. This summer, buy the book and enjoy this great creative genius of our culture.
