"We will finish with all of you"
BarcelonaIn 1936, 865 book titles had been published in Catalonia in Catalan, the highest number reached during the republican years. In 1976, with Franco already dead, 872 were published. Four decades had passed and Catalan was just emerging from the depths. Currently, production approaches 7,000 titles annually. The cultural battle for the language is also fought today in the audiovisual world. But written culture remains the foundation of everything. Where do we come from?
It's been 60 years since La Caputxinada, the meeting of university students and intellectuals against the Franco regime. Carles-Jordi Guardiola, who would later lead the publishing house La Magrana for five years ("big red" hand, that is, red, left-wing) and become a scholar of Carles Riba, was there with other classmates from Romance philology: Montserrat Roig, Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Francesc Parcerisas, Jordi Porta, Manuel Jorba... It was presided over by Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Salvador Espriu, Joan Oliver, Manuel Sacristán, and the delegates from the various faculties of the UB.
The students of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) dominated the atmosphere. Guardiola was from the Catalan National Front (FNC); he would later join the Socialist Party of National Liberation (PSAN), as did the recently deceased Blanca Serra. Although the affiliated intellectuals came mostly from Catalanism repressed by the dictatorship, at the founding of the Democratic Student Union at La Caputxinada, only one document was read in Catalan, recalls the future publisher in Memòria imperfecta. 1942-1969 (Llibres Parcir). "Of the Documents de la Caputxinada reported by Crexell, out of 45 pages, only 8 are in Catalan. Even the posters hung in the Capuchin friary in Sarrià are bilingual," notes Guardiola, who the following academic year would organize a tribute to Jordi Rubió in a lecture hall at the Faculty of Law. It was also a success. It also suffered repression.
In this second act, at the presidential table were again Sacristán and Oliver, Maria Aurèlia Campany, Oriol Bohigas, Joan Triadú, Miquel Coll i Alentorn, Josep de C. Serra Ràfols –father of Blanca and Eva Serra–, Alexandre Galí, the Capuchin Jordi Llimona, Joan Colomines and Rubió’s son –Jordi Rubió i Lois–. When the philologist Joan Coromines arrived, the attendees burst into applause: they had mistaken him for Jordi Rubió... The list of attendees is impressive: from Ernest Lluch and Herbert Barrera to Roca i Junyent or Joan Raventós, from Mario Vargas Llosa to José Agustín Goytisolo, Carlos Barral and Josep M. Castellet, from Ricard Bofill to Pere Portabella or Carme Serrallonga. And many more (almost all men, yes). Among the adhesions: Picasso, Pau Casals, Miró, Abbot Escarré, Aranguren, Menéndez Pidal, Espriu, Tàpies, Joan Fuster...
At the exit, the list of detainees exceeded twenty following a sinister welcoming shout: "We will finish you all off, Catholics, communists, separatists. Three years in Burgos, you will spend them!". Jordi Carbonell was tortured and the dean of the Bar Association, Frederic Roda Ventura, died of a heart attack the day after a heated discussion with the judge handling the case. All this happened six decades ago. Freedom and Catalan gained ground, not without risk and personal struggle for many people at the end of the long dictatorship and during the uncertain Transition. There was the silent majority and there were those who rolled up their sleeves and took risks.
The prodigious decade of the sixties
Guardiola reports the intellectual combat between Jordi Solé Tura's Catalanism and Bourgeois Revolution (1967) and Josep Benet, who responded in Serra d’Or by calling the work, which accused the conservative right of instrumentalizing Catalanism, "biased, ideologized, and simplistic". And above all, Guardiola reviews the prodigious decade of the 60s: the birth of Òmnium Cultural (1961), Cavall Fort (1961), Edicions 62 (1962), Aymà (1962), La plaça del Diamant by Rodoreda (1962), Els Joglars (1962), the declarations of Abbot Escarré in Le Monde (1963), the Picasso Museum (1963), CCOO (1964), La Galera (1965), Enciclopèdia Catalana (1965), Antoni Comas as the first professor of Catalan literature at the UB after the war (1965), the explosion of Nova Cançó, the 3i4 bookstore in Valencia (1968), the key essays by Joan Fuster, Paco Candel, and Josep Benet...
Carles-Jordi Guardiola, who had Joaquim Molas
as one of his great mentors, and Josep Ruaix – the man with the flashcards for learning Catalan – a friend since adolescence, and who has been a pillar in the recovery of the publishing world in the Catalan language, now reveals his family origins, his time in the seminary of Vic, and his intellectual blossoming. Memòria imperfecta is a perfectly necessary memoir to reconstruct the cultural history of the country. In times of narcissism, it is relevant to highlight that, like him, so many others have built a plural and open Catalan identity day by day, doing a lot of quiet work, from an esforced second row.
As Wilhelm Stekel, Freud's most distinguished disciple, wrote: "What distinguishes an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while what distinguishes a mature man is that he wants to live humbly to serve it." The true heroes of the country are the Guardiolas who make continuity possible. They did not finish us off.