The "totemic, subversive, and innovative" Pere Gimferrer receives an honorary doctorate.

BarcelonaWith his hands behind his back and taking short steps – reminiscent of a tin figure taken from an avant-garde poem – Pedro Gimferrer (Barcelona, ​​​​1945) walked, this Thursday at noon, the corridor of the auditorium of the University of Barcelona. The author ofThe mirrors He was to receive the institution's highest honor, the doctorate honoris causa, for his "literary career, which produced a prolific body of work, but also for his great contribution to the studies of art, film and literature," according to Dr. Marina Solé.

Sitting between the dean of the Faculty of Philology and Communication, Javier Velaza, and the godfather who would read the praise of the new doctor, Jordi Marrugat, Gimferrer observed everything that happened around him with curiosity and a touch of concern, although he had been receiving awards for decades, the first of which was the National Poetry Award, which he won in 1966 – at only 21 years of age – for his second book of poems, The sea is burning.

Baroque, avant-garde and parodied

"Gimferrer has been a great innovator of modern high culture and an unavoidable presence in two literatures," Marrugat admitted in his speech. Among the audience were poets such as Perejaume, Vicenç Altaió and Eduard Escoffet, narrators such as Eduardo Mendoza and some of the editors of the honoree, such as Elena Ramírez, Jordi Cornudella and Pilar Beltran. "After leaving his mark on Castilian poetry in the 60s, he did the same with Catalan literature from the 70s onwards and, apart from his creative work, he made key contributions to the study of JV Foix and Joan Brossa". While "claiming the avant-garde" and "recovering the Catalan baroque", Gimferrer spread his daily and intellectual life in Diary (1981) and wrote "very influential" essays such as Readings by Octavio Paz (1983) and Cinema and literature (1985). "On some occasions, Gimferrer imposes himself on the poetry reader in the most subversive way," Marrugat stated, before reading some verses from The deserted space (1977)–: "If love is the place of excrement,/ if, offering myself, now naked on all fours, the two globes of/ light of the buttocks, you turn the breasts, like the seed/ and the root when their time comes...". Although he has been a demanding, polymorphic author for minorities, Gimferrer has also known how to infiltrate the mass media, where he has been "invited and parodied." "He is a totem that we read, criticize, denounce and admire," said Marrugat.

When it was his turn to speak, once he had received his degree, his mortarboard, his ring, "the white gloves of purity" and the embrace of the academy, offered by Joan Guardia, rector of the University of Barcelona, ​​​​Pere Gimferrer spoke "of comparative poetics." The first part of the speech consisted of the reading and exegesis of three poems by Gabriel Ferrater, whom he translated into Spanish. Women and days with JA Goytisolo and JM Valverde in 1979. It started with The other way around and Idiot song, "visibly autobiographical poems, with a fragmentary or fragmented structure, ritornello, (almost equivalent, or rather homologous, to the "returned word" of troubadour lyrics)". The verse "I will say what flees me. I will say nothing of myself" has led him to Quevedo, and Quevedo has referred him to Castiglione, Du Bellay and Carles Riba.

Transformed into a curious sparrow, Pere Gimferrer jumped from branch to branch to reveal where his sister is heading. Babel, by Ferrater, and admitting that his work is "tributary" and follows "the models." And a little further on, he proclaimed: "The poem is an unshakeable experience," words that led him to list a new list of influences, including Alberti, Mayakovsky, Rilke, and Ungaretti. Gimferrer has demonstrated, once again, in the auditorium of the university where he graduated in the 1960s with a degree in Philosophy, Letters, and Law, that, in his case, poetry, life, and erudition are inextricably linked.