I have written and said, and I like to repeat it, that Manel Marí is one of the most important Catalan-language poets of his generation. Manel died prematurely on January 31, 2018, and he is a friend I miss, but these are not the reasons that lead me to affirm this. That Manel Marí is a great poet of his time is confirmed by readers of his books; those who haven't read him can turn to the anthology. The nomad and the root, prepared by Carles Rebassa, on which I also had the joy of collaborating. Poetry, like music, establishes a direct connection with the parts of the brain that deal with what we don't know how to say. That's why it can't lie, and that's why, in the face of poetry, one can't lie either. Vanity, disdain, or self-serving or arrogant forgetfulness are of no use. Manel Marí's poems are there, shining brightly at all times, expanding the repertoire of what the Catalan language is capable of saying and its ways of saying it, and always challenging, until they burn in their fire, "the fireproof fragments of ready-made morals."
The generation in which Manel Marí stood out so powerfully was young in the 1990s, which means they have fully entered what is called middle age. We're all in our fifties now, and Manel would have turned fifty this year, on August 17th, because he was as much a native of Agostino as the finest figs: the finest, most exquisite summer fruits with the most ground, delicious, nutritious, and powerful pulp, like his verses. Turning fifty shouldn't have any more or less importance than forty-nine, thirty-two, or seventy-eight, but even if we don't want it to, it's a birthday that has something emblematic, a turning point, a mezzo from the cammin of our vita. It would have been a pleasure to celebrate Manel's fiftieth birthday with the catchy and subversive joy that he brought to things, to celebrate together this landing of life from which, I'm sure, he would have continued to know how to laugh at those who think they are important with his strong and sharp irony, which had nothing to do with the song. And he would have continued to illuminate our literature and our language with new poems that we can only imagine now. The sarcasms of death have meant that this summer we have had to We also regret that of Xuan Bello, who had just turned sixty, another rounded number. Now Manel and Xuan, Xuan and Manel, embrace each other in memory and in affection, with so many things they had in common: literary animals who devoured the days with bites and voracious gulps, armed with a sense of humor that was dynamite capable of blowing up any form of imposture, with the form of imposture, with a knowledge of imposture, with a knowledge of literature. Literature, if it wasn't life, it was nothing: just literature.
The years go by, and Manel Marí remains one of the most important poets of his time. Permanence, culture (the homeland, if you like to call it that), is what his verses and his example teach us. The rest is smoke.
