Josep Pedrals: "The day I discovered we had the 'Kama Sutra' at home I freaked out"

BarcelonaUp to now, and for almost thirty years, we have known Josep Pedrals (Barcelona, 1979) as a poet, a performer, a lecturer, and a cultural manager. With Poeticismes (Arcàdia, 2026), he debuts as an essayist with the same combination of pleasantness, erudition, and humor that abounds in his verses. In the catch-all drawer that is Pedrals' new book, we find reflections on emperors buried in honey or on the monument to Jacint Verdaguer on Passeig de Sant Joan, chronicles of some of the thousands of recitals in which he has participated around the world —like the one that took him to Macedonia accompanied by Adam Zagajewski—, vindications of authors less known to readers than they should be, and a wealth of curious technical speculations on poetry writing, one of his great passions, along with omnivorous reading and a love for the stage.

You have cited us at the place where you usually work, a private library in the Clot neighborhood of Barcelona with almost 30,000 volumes, a large part of which your father, Ricard Pedrals i Blanxart, a pedagogue and priest until he secularized in 1978, accumulated and read.

— It works very well for me to have a space just for work, and especially for it to be this one, which connects me to my father, who is the person I've known who read the most in the world. He even used to walk down the street reading, even though a good part of his readings were books of deep thought.

The library is divided into three large rooms. What do we find there?

— There is one that literature occupies, which is what I have been growing the most lately, with a lot of poetry, literary theory, history of literature, and classics. In this room where we are, there are a few sections: education and scouting, anthropology, politics, and history of Catalonia. My father was a teacher for thirty years. I believe he was one of the first to teach Catalan during Franco's regime. He always explained that one day a student's father appeared in his office, placed a pistol on the table and said: "I see you teach Catalan". He replied: "I can talk about anything with you, but first take the pistol off the table."

In the third room I have seen essays by Lacan, Kierkegaard, Mounier, Freud, Lluís Duch...

— The books in the front row are philosophy, and those in the back row are theology. Father read a lot of them, and he kept buying them until almost the end of his life: we have all the major European philosophy new releases from 2017, the year he died. "Isn't it beautiful and interesting to talk about God," Father used to say to us at home. It was one of his fascinations. He would start talking to you about God and you could almost fall in love with him.

The idea of God was present, in your home. And in you?

— At home we prayed constantly. My father took Christianity as a job, in a way. I have adapted it from a literary and social point of view. When I say he took it as a job, I mean that until the last few years he spent hours at the parish helping out. He believed that you can have all the vocations you want and the most elaborate idealism in the world, but you have to put them into practice with those around you. Try to get along with your neighbors: it's the most practical thing in the world!

Let's talk about your father and the environment you lived in at home because I would like to know where your passion for writing verses came from. When did you write your first poems?

— The father was a true intellectual. Now we are in this library, which we have had since around 2000. Before, the library was our home. There were books everywhere and that influenced me. My mother still keeps the first ones from when she was 6 or 7 years old. They were exercises to make the language sound, above all. It was around the age of 14 that I inaugurated my first notebook. I wrote poems there every evening. It was almost a diary. Besides talking about the girls I liked, I tried to enrich my vocabulary and find the music in it all. In those years I already read a lot and had the habit of reading certain things, which partly came from home, because my father made available to me books by authors like Tomàs Garcés or Clementina Arderiu.

Did you like them then?

— I have a special affection for them because I read them when I was very young. When we got up to go to school or high school, my father had already gone to buy the bread and the newspaper and had breakfast reading Josep Carner, you know? I remember that when the Quaderns Crema edition of Poetry 1957 came out, he reread it entirely.

This book only had almost 1,400 pages...

— There was a time when she became very fond of reading Paul Éluard, and she would laugh a lot. I was educated in a library and knew it so well by heart that sometimes my father would ask me where to find books he couldn't locate. The day I discovered we had the Kamasutra at home I freaked out. I read it and thought it was the least erotic thing in the world.

Even so, something must have remained, because eroticism has been quite important in your poetry.

— Yes, yes, but in the line of L'ars amandi by Ovid. My eroticism is more Latin: it is not at all Hindu.

You debuted in 1999 with Els buits enutjosos, published by Associació Cultural Contàiner, where Enric Casasses had recently introduced Uh. Although you were only 20 years old, you had been reciting for some time.

— I started performing poetry in 1997. Next year it will be thirty years since I started. Right now I feel very old...

What made you get on a stage to read your verses? We all have a very particular story about the first time.

— I met Eduard Escoffet at high school. He started much earlier, even earlier than me. As we became friends, one day he invited me to see things that weren't common in my circle. Thanks to my father, I had met Josep Maria Boix i Selva, the translator of John Milton's Paradise Lost, when he was already very old. And for a high school project, I had interviewed David Jou, who, like Boix, was very cultured and whom I still consider a reference in certain things. But neither of them was my age... Besides writing poems, I had done a lot of theater, as a child. Father Puig and company used to stage Els pastorets and La passió every year, here in El Clot. It was one of my weaknesses. When Eduard introduced me to the world of live performance, I was able to combine my love for the stage and for writing poems.

In 1997 you went on tour with some heavyweights of Catalan literature at the time.

— L'Enric Casasses, Dolors Miquel, Pau Riba... and Noel Tatú. That's what Dolors explains in her latest book, El pit adormitIt is what Dolors explains in her latest bookEls buits enutjosos, Escola italiana [Edicions 62, 2003], I started the Quim Porta trilogy with El furgatori [LaBreu, 2006], I played in various groups, I premiered plays... At 20 years old, I already had a section in the culture supplement of Avui, which David Castillo directed.

Later we were able to read you in El País, Cavall Fort, Esguard... and for three years you wrote a daily sonnet for l'ARA.

— ... and for three years you wrote a sonnet every day in ARA.Poeticismes, which begins like this: "If they have borrowed my leaven, / for prejudice: judgment! / Of orphaned gold, Phoenician novice, / I migrate there (grotesque outburst)".

In this specifically we see your fondness for word games.

— Some say that word games have nothing to do with poetry and that they bring it closer to jokes, cacophony, or mere artifice. I think the opposite.

I remember that in many recitals, where humor of all kinds abounds - crude, sophisticated, ironic, satirical - you used to say: "Make humor and not war".

— I love humor. For a season, at recitals I repeated the slogan "make humor and not war", which I like a lot, as a tribute to Jaume Perich. Perich influenced me a lot. I remember that joke where some guys look at the sky and one says: "Do you think there are intelligent worlds beyond?" And the other replies: "Well, not all of them have to be like ours, right?" It's very silly and very good at the same time.

Poeticismes dedicates a preface to explaining the book's title. You speak of how Novalis invented the term within the Fragments to respond "to pure rationalism while seeking a complexity that includes the irrational, cultivated from the impalpable, emotional and soulful, paradoxical and mysterious".

— From there I move on to poeticism as a movement of the second Mexican avant-gardes, which contrasted the meditated work of art with the vivacity of the inspired poet who sings spontaneously.

Instead of taking the suffix -ism as a school –in the book you cite Dadaism, Conceptualism, and Decadentism–, you say you approach the craft of writing "as a festive prank".

— I always try to have a good time and for the reader or the audience to also have a good time reading or listening to me. A poem or a recital can be as entertaining as a novel.

I remember how last December you won over the audience at the Guadalajara Fair by reciting some of your poems and the Spanish translations that appear in the anthology Insinuando la incógnita (El Ángel Editor, 2025).

— Thank you! In Poeticismes I talk about some of the trips I've made to perform around the world. I'm not much of a traveler, but for work I've been to dozens of countries.

In the book I missed the adventure in Japan in 2009.

— It was a surprising and fun experience that I might explain in a second volume of Poeticismes. In 2009 I was offered the chance to participate in an international poetry slam in Osaka and I went. 400 Japanese people voted among the audience... and I won! The ones who were most badly beaten in the votes were the Japanese poets. I thought that the less they understood you, the funnier it must be for them.

You recited in Catalan, right?

— Yes, yes. I think the Iberian r sound, which does not exist in Japanese, greatly influenced my victory. That is one of the theories I have. That and that it probably also helped a little that I did the poem about the dictators.

It's the one where you recite the names of dictators from all over the world, right? I remember the moment "Fujimori Pol Pot, Fujimori Pol Pot".

— It is a poem that brings together two curious virtues. The first is that it is only made up of anthroponyms from very distant and distinct places: it generates a cadence that you don't quite know what it is, it seems like a spell. The second is that it allows for a subtle critique, by simply mentioning each dictator's name.

Since 1997 you have participated in thousands of recitals and have participated in about fifteen books. You also hosted, for thirteen years, the weekly poetry cycle at the Horiginal bar, on Ferlandina street.

— I started in 2001. At that time, I believed that Barcelona needed a space that would bring together people of very different ages and sensitivities who wanted to listen to or recite poetry. The approach we chose was lively and tavern-like, with the intention that everyone who wanted to join would join. After some time, we renamed L'Horiginal to Orinal thanks to Jordi Prenafeta, who wrote very well-crafted satirical poetry. Our slogan was: "All poets eventually end up going through the urinal", with the aim of bringing the poet down from the pedestal.

Veterans like Francesc Garriga, Carles Hac Mor, Ester Xargay, Enric Casasses, and Jordi Vintró often came here, but also young authors like Martí Sales, Max Besora, Blanca Llum Vidal, Laia Martínez i López, Ivette Nadal...

— There was a whole magma that was concentrating there and that, later, in a way has dispersed. L'Horiginal continues to be alive, the weekly recitals are now held at La Deskomunal, and they have a different function, which is also very good, which is to connect with a younger generation of authors and audiences.

You have brought poetry wherever you have been allowed: to large festivals, local festivals, athenaeums, civic centers, museums, schools, and high schools.

— Every year I do a series of commented recitals in schools and institutes. I used to do them with David Castillo. Now Núria Martínez-Vernis accompanies me. In every class I go to, there is one, two, or three students who like poetry. In some there are up to six. That's a lot of people, if we were to add them up.

Is there hope for the future of verses, then?

— Poetry is less of a minority than they try to make us believe. It's not as followed as football, but it has an audience, and it's not exactly small. If poetry has allowed me to make a living all this time, it must be for something, right?