Perejaume: "It is madness that the human species has decided to forget about nature"

BarcelonaPerejaume's readers (Sant Pol de Mar, 1957) know that, in their poems, aphorisms and essays, literary creation and nature are intertwined, they feed off each other and even merge. To put it in words that can be found in The Written, his latest book, "the text is based on the slope of the land", there is "a humid breeze that always runs letters up" and you can "bind several valleys linked by the valley". "Ah, if only I knew how to write like any mountain writes!" exclaims the author in one of the segments of The open table, the initial section that opens the volume.

Posted by L'Otra, The Written It takes its name from a tributary of the Noguera Pallaresa and represents, at the same time, the latest example of a "water-graphed" and "fontasserenada" literature that has previously produced such dazzling books as Construction site (Editions 62, 2003), Take a virgin out to dance (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018) and The sun and the bonfires (Tushita, 2022). "Perejaume is an author who needs to expand: you take away three branches of text and he expands it by one hectare," says editor Maria-Arboç Terrades in relation to how the book has grown over the last few months. The project began with two performance texts: The arborist, a commission by Xavier Albertí for the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya that premiered in 2020, and The Written, performed at the Pompeu Fabra University Water Library on two occasions, in 2022 and 2024.

One of the most unique contributions to the volume was soon added, Women, motivated by a trip in 2023. "Dodona is an oracle of Zeus located in Epirus. It was the oldest oracle in Greece," he says. "There, the God of Gods spoke through the mouth of a tree. It was a sonorous oak. A tree that makes sounds attracts me a lot." When he returned from his Greek trip, Perejaume went up to an oak grove in Montnegre that he knows and spent a night: "I wanted to see if the trees told me something," he says, before remembering that he has an oak table in his studio. It is the place where he usually writes. Once again, nature and creation are linked.

A The Written, trees are as important as mountains and water. "Rivers are the vehicles that the mountains use to descend. Their writing goes all the way to the sea," says Perejaume, who has been working on the book's three initial texts for the last year: The open table, Hydrography and Twenty-two basins, and the epilogue. In all of them nature beats with a ductile and spongy language: "The sonorous river and the speaking tree can pair up and generate a discourse," he says, and mentions, among the inspiring figures, names that are common in his work such as Joan Brossa, Carlos Santos and J.V. Foix, but also Eduard Fontserè (1870-1970), the father of Catalan meteorology. "It is madness that the human species has decided to forget nature," he explains. "The technological world is acosmic and filthy, in the sense that it wants to supplant the world by all rights. Man cannot separate himself from the nature that created him and raises him."