Anthony, Antoni Bonner

Anthony or Antoni Bonner, who described himself as "a Mallorcan in New York," has died at the age of ninety-seven. He leaves behind an important legacy: intellectual, as a scholar of Ramon Llull, and civic, as an environmental activist. His work on Llull's thought and writings is internationally renowned and earned him several doctorates. honorary cause (by the University of the Balearic Islands, the University of Barcelona, and the University of Freiburg). His tireless interest in nature and the environment led him to become a founding member, in 1973, of the Balearic Islands' most prominent and longest-running environmental organization: the Balearic Group for Ornithology and Nature Defense, better known as the GOB. In a short time, incidentally, the publisher Francesc Moll, who was also a founder of the GOB, and just a few days ago, Professor Xisco Avellà, younger than Bonner and Moll but a long-serving president of the organization, also passed away. It is worth noting that within the magnificent catalog of the Moll publishing house (now managed and expanded with new additions by Nueva Editorial Moll) are two seminal works by Anthony Bonner, one in the field of naturalism and the other in Lullism: these are Plants of the Balearic Islands, a contribution that remains crucial today to the understanding of the country's natural environment, and of the Selected Works of Ramon LlullA two-volume anthology of the most important texts by the founder of Catalan literature, with all due respect to the ancient troubadours. This selected work by Llull is the Catalan version of the same anthology that Bonner had published in English four years earlier in the USA, thanks to a research grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Bonner was born in New York into a wealthy family and, after a brief stay in Mallorca in the mid-1950s, he and his wife Eva decided to settle there at the end of the decade. Anthony's (or Antoni's, as he signed his name and preferred to be called) Catalan was exemplary in both speech and writing; conversation with him was a fascinating experience, as wise and rigorous as it was pleasant and entertaining. His wide range of interests led him to the study of Llull, who was, after all, a heterodox thinker, more rigorous in his research and arguments than academics. Bonner was a distinguished scholar of Lull's Art of Philosophy (that is, the most demanding part of the author's work). Blanquerna and from Book of WondersHe made insightful contributions to clarifying the Lullian corpus, often intricate due to its abundance (Llull was a prolific writer) and the attribution of apocryphal or spurious texts over the centuries. Bonner has been an exemplary citizen and man of letters, who has honored the country where he chose to live (Mallorca, Catalan Countries) by contributing to the common good through service to nature, culture, and literature. As his beloved Ramon Llull wrote: "Love is born of memory, lives on intelligence, and dies from forgetting."