Francesc Parcerisas is one of the fundamental poets of current Catalan poetry and has just published Fer-ne vuitanta, a prose book that he has written – as the title suggests – to mark his eightieth birthday. The book – published as always by Quaderns Crema – is, as the author himself has said, difficult to define or label, halfway between memoir, a photographic album, a poetic and fetishistic evocation of certain life moments, and a diary: in addition to his poetry books, Parcerisas has published several excellent diaries, such as La primavera a Pequín, Un estiu or La tardor em sobta. Two years ago he published the essential volume Triomf del present, which brings together his poetry books between 1965 and 2000 (there are rare, or even unpublished, materials), and a second volume is expected to gather all his poetic work from 2000 onwards.Make eighty-two a subtitle: Prints, evocations, images, which gives a certain idea of its content. Each year of the life of Francesc Parcerisas (who was born in 1944) is associated with an image; each image bears a brief explanatory text in the manner, we could say, of a caption, and finally there is a longer text – but never excessively so – that tells a story, draws the profile of a person, recovers a landscape, recounts a lived event, etc. The images can be by the author himself, by other people who have an important weight in the book (and in the author's life), of landscapes, of texts, or even of academic or administrative documents. Always, in each case, they correspond to the year of reference.The result is a delight, a book that produces a lasting dazzlement in the reader after finishing it. This is achieved by the literary mastery that Parcerisas exhibits in each of the texts included, and the way in which he gives meaning and coherence to apparently heterogeneous and scattered materials. At some point during the reading, I thought that "Fer-ne vuitanta" made me think of the book "L'any en estampes" by the great poet from Ibiza, Marià Villangómez, although in reality they only have in common the unfolding of a happily selective and fragmentary memory (and the fact that Villangómez, in addition to being a poet, was also an excellent translator from English, as is Parcerisas, to whom we owe translations of Seamus Heaney, Ezra Pound, or J.R.R. Tolkien, starting, of course, with "The Lord of the Rings). Afterwards, I realized that what made me connect Parcerisas with Villangómez was precisely Ibiza: the largest island of the Pitiuses has a great prominence in the book, and in the life of the author. Another reference is the memoir that Henry Miller also wrote on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, and which is precisely titled, On turning eighty".To make eighty has, in short, a game element that invites the reader to imagine a similar journey through their own life. And it produces that unmistakable sensation of awakening, of discovering something unexpected, of activating intuition and intelligence, which is a hallmark of good literature.
