The desire for literary classics: sweet, unrestrained, lustful, or forbidden

BarcelonaThe first "to desire and burn" in his verses was Sappho, from the Greek island of Lesbosbetween the 7th and 6th centuries BC. "Eros stirs my heart / like the wind that lashes the oaks in the mountains," says one of the fragments that have come down to us according to the latest Catalan translation, signed by Eloi Creus (Proa, 2022). Two centuries later, in Song of SongsIn this love poem, a foundational piece of mystical literature, two lovers converse about the pleasure of loving each other, sparing no detail of remarkable sensuality: "How delicious are your caresses, / my sister, my wife! / Your caresses are sweeter than wine."

The presence of desire in literature is as old as literary tradition itself, as evidenced by... Classics Festival, which dedicates its 2025 edition precisely to desire. The examples are countless, from the Song of Songs, which ended up being included in the Tanakh Hebrew—and later, in the Christian Bible—because Rabbi Akiva argued that instead of explaining the physical and spiritual relationship between a man and a woman, it metaphorically depicted God's relationship with his people. Desire is the driving force behind much of troubadour poetry and is capable of driving heroic protagonists mad, both from Chrétien de Troyes as from the Arthurian cycle. It can tarnish the lives of the characters in some of the tales of Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1351) and takes on psychological complexity in the Throwing the White, by Joanot Martorell, written in the mid-15th century.

Lust, "weariness of the spirit"

With William ShakespeareIn one of the pinnacles of Western literature, the unbridled desire is dissected in plays such as Romeo and Juliet (1597), but also through the Sonnets (1609). "It wasn't until the 20th century that critics and readers realized that, if we only had Shakespeare's Sonnets"That alone would be enough for us to consider him one of the greats among the greats," writes Salvador Oliva in the introduction to his Catalan version of the poems, published by Edicions 62 in 2002. The English author's ornate Baroque aesthetic is "perfectly compatible with the expression of amorous passion," he continues, briefly, in the first 126 compositions, in which the dominant theme is the poet's love for a young boy. The second part comprises the remaining 27 [...] in which the dominant theme is the sexual subjugation (and above all, the inability to express himself) that the poet feels for a dark-haired woman, the enigmatic dark lady"And I envy that agile, undulating glide / of those tender hands I long to kiss," admits the lyrical self in sonnet 128 as he watches his beloved playing music. The poem concludes with this couplet: "And since the instrument cannot tire of you, / give it your fingers and..."

In many of Shakespeare's sonnets dedicated to the dark ladyThe materialization of desire is not viewed favorably. Lust is described as a "weariness of the spirit" and a "shameful waste" in poem 129: "Having it, delight, and, obtained, a mere trifle," it continues; "first a jewel; then, a drifting dream." Even so, sexual passion, "blind to the knowledge of good and evil," as Salvador Oliva reminds us, is equated with love in another of the sonnets, in 151: "It is not a lack of conscience if I call love / for whom I rise and fall without strength."

A married man's dark desire

At the beginning of the 19th century, JW Goethe explored the metamorphoses of desire in a bourgeois marriage in Elective affinities (1809), almost four decades after popularizing Werther's fatal despair over a girl betrothed to The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). At the height of Romanticism, the mature Goethe's perspective explains how the idyllic and dull life of Eduard and Charlotte begins to change when Charlotte's orphaned niece, Ottilie, comes to stay at their home.

"Charlotte is the mother Ottilie's, not biological [...] but symbolic, because she has made a public commitment to take care of this impoverished girl until her goddaughter can establish herself as one of those closed circles of high society – writes Simona Škrabec in the prologue to the Catalan translation that Carlota Gurt "She did it for La Casa dels Clàssics in 2023—. But Charlotte doesn't treat her like a daughter, but like a rival, and Eduard, who in this picture of good intentions should be her adoptive father, exerts relentless violence: he wants to possess her as a woman, without having given her either the time or the independence necessary to mature." Ottilie tries to accept the game in order to reciprocate unrestrainedly," Skrabec continues, "but however much the girl aspires to merge with the person of her protector, she will never quite fit into the dynamics of that family because she doesn't quite belong. Also because Eduard himself, unlike the count and the baroness—who are able to live openly in relationships—acts on his impulses." This can be seen, for example, when Eduard and Ottilie ventured along a "peppered path" in order to find an old mill: "And when from time to time, in dangerous places, Ottilie would take the hand he extended to her and even let him know that the female creature he touched was the most delicate of all. He almost wished that she would stumble, that she would slip, so that he could take her in his arms and press her to his heart. However, he would not have done that under any circumstances, for more than one reason: he was afraid of offending her, of hurting her."

Emma Bovary's Double Adultery

Gustave Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary in the mid-19th century "as a penance, and almost as a punishment," he recalls Lluís Maria Todó, the latest translator into Catalan of the novel –published by Columna in 1992 and revised for the La Butxaca edition in 2008–, in an essay included in the volume Admirable literature (Past & Present, 2017). After finishing the first version of The Temptation of Saint AnthonyThe then-young Flaubert—who was 28 years old—read this long story to two of his best friends. One of them, Louise Bouilhet, recommended that he "throw those pages into the fire" and forget about them "forever." She also gave him some advice: "Choose a prosaic subject, an incident from bourgeois life, and force yourself to treat it naturally."

Flaubert, motivated by reading in the press about the suicide of a young adulteress, abandoned and indebted, Delphine Delamare, began writing in 1856. Madame Bovary appeared in four installments The Paris ReviewShortly before its publication in book form in 1857, the novel was prosecuted for immorality, which contributed to its popularity. The work delves into the dull life of a provincial couple, Charles and Emma Bovary. It is Emma who, influenced by the passionate emotions gleaned from the novels she devours, combined with a peculiar—at times laughable—mystical streak, feels compelled to become involved with two men, Rodolphe and Léon. "In Flaubert's novel, sex, and more specifically female desire, is shown in the most explicit way that the genre and the time allowed, or perhaps even a little more, as the trial aimed at attacking morality demonstrates," summarizes Lluís Maria Todó, who believes that even Madame BovaryNovelistic realism had systematically omitted sex: "It had rarely found acceptable territory between pornography and dissimulation or mere denial."

The masterful ambiguity of Emily Dickinson

Desire, sparked on the ground or culminating on wheels, in a carriage cruising the streets of Rouen, as in Flaubert's novel, contrasts with the ethereal—pansexual and devout—pulse that appears in dozens of Emily Dickinson's poems.

Without ever leaving her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, the American poet created a cryptic and sumptuous body of work, of great "cognitive originality" and enormous "intellectual complexity": these were the accolades bestowed upon her. Harold Bloom in the influential essay The Western Canon (1994), as D. Sam Abrams recalls in the prologue to the latest Catalan version of the Complete Poetry by Dickinson, made by Jaume Bosquet and published by 1984 Editions"What a contrast to the images of a spontaneous, rather sentimental and excessive poet!" she exclaims, echoing some of the stereotypes associated with the author for years, and long since outdated.

"I have an arrow here. / Loving the hand that launched it / I venerate the dart. / Fallen, they will say, in skirmish"My soul shall be vanquished / By but a single arrow / Shot by an archer's bow," Dickinson writes in poem 56, a unique reading of the wound that Cupid's arrows inflict on the loverReading Dickinson, it's unclear whether the subject of her love poems is a lover, male or female—much has been speculated about the author's fascination with her sister-in-law Susan—whether it's God or even nature itself. Much of the charm of the American poet's work lies in its ambiguity, which allows it to be read from diverse perspectives such as religion, ecology, and worldview. queerThus, one of his most celebrated compositions begins in the following way: "'Why do I love You, Lord? / Because — / The Wind does not ask the Grass / To answer — That is why when He blows / It cannot remain still."