Catalonia in 1925, a century ago, was a country of contrasts, from ideal Noucentisme to revolutionary radicalism. The cliché works: "sign and speed"" (sanity and rapture). This May marks the centenary of the attempted assassination of King Alfonso XIII, the Garraf Plot, and also of the publication of The bonhomies, a collection of newspaper articles by Josep Carner in The Voice of CataloniaBehind the plot lay the long shadow of the future president Macià; behind the delightful book lay the literary heartbeat of the "prince of Catalan poets." A self-made prince, the son of an orderly middle class: his father was an editor of the Carlist newspaper The Catalan Post Office. It was the time of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and everyone tried to escape it as best they could.
Regarding the plot, three decades ago I met one of those who participated, Emili Granier Barrera (1908-1997), when he published his memoirs in 1994, A full life (a full life). And so full! At 16, he was already part of that failed regicide promoted by separatists. He was a member of Black Flag, within the Estat Català (Catalan State) of a Macià whom those young people of action at that time saw as too passive. They were reflected in Irish insurrectionary nationalism. They were arrested before they could throw the bomb at the train in which the monarch was traveling. Granier Barrera and the others spent three years in prison.
At 86, he was a friendly old man who retained the impetuous tone of youth, from when he declared himself a "socialist, separatist, republican, and atheist." In 1930, he left Estat Català and joined Joan Comorera's Unió Socialista de Catalunya (Catalan Socialist Union), a party of which he became secretary general. He was the first Catalan translator of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. In 1934 he participated in the October Events, and was again arrested and imprisoned. At the end of the Civil War, he went into exile and in Paris directed the clandestine newspaper Catalonia and participated in the French resistance. He remained loyal to Comorera and, when he was arrested, organized an international campaign for his release. In 1954, he settled in Venezuela and did not return to Catalonia until 1978, after Franco's death.
The Garraf Plot well portrays the revolutionary and violent spirit of the period, just after the First World War. Catalonia had grown wealthy from the conflict, but it had also become polarized and suffered under the dictatorial regime. Gunmen in the pay of the employers and anarchists killed each other in the streets of Barcelona: 400 dead between 1918 and 1923. The country was burning ideologically and culturally. Dalmau Editor has just reissued the classic The Garraf Plot, by Joan Crexell, an essential work.
These days, the Library of Catalonia has held a series of events to commemorate the centenary of three texts by Carnerina. Apart from The bonhomies, The still heart and the translation of Robinson Crusoe. Halfway between tenderness and irony, Carner's journalism was not about facts or current affairs. He had a flair for language, elegant, savory, detailed... and with depth. He often returned to delightful poetic prose. In the press, the ideologue of the Catalanist right was Eugeni d'Ors. And the pen of political combat would eventually be wielded by Josep Pla when he moved from the Catalan government in 1928 to the Catalan parliament. The Advertising to The Vveu of Catalonia and put himself at Cambó's service. (On the left were many literary writers, starting with that of another poet, JV Foix.)
Carner's everyday journalism, with a literary vocation and no explicit political pretensions, is a genre. It would later serve Pla to weather Franco's regime; Espinàs turned it into his own brand (even now, Empar Moliner occasionally sends us at ARA an article with the tag "I've done an Espinàs"); Calders brought imagination to it. Montserrat Roig, while searching for the vital pulse, added a pinch of salt and pepper: feminism, Catalanism, leftism. Carles Capdevila followed in Espinàs's footsteps, but with humor (and philosophy). Today, the most Carner-esque is Narcís Comadira.
A century after that turbulent 1925, the independence movement has grown and become nonviolent. And journalism has become more prosaic and impatient: life and history have sped up.
