Saint George with Feliu Formosa and Josep M. Llompart

It must be said that if the president of the Generalitat (Catalan government), Salvador Illa, wanted to talk with a writer for Sant Jordi, he was naturally free to do so with Javier Cercas, but it's a shame because he thus missed the opportunity to chat with Feliu Formosa. There was also a looming birthday that could have served as a pretext, since Formosa just turned ninety last September, in excellent physical and mental health. Isla could have talked with Formosa. about the nursing homes where he has lived –which he does with an impressive irony and delicacy–, and also about the new and magnificent books with which he has celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Six books, no less, half a dozen splendid ones, three of his own creations and three translations: The Yellow Notebook (dazzled and dazzling poems in verse and prose, in Edicions 96), Approximations (a book of fragments, notes and illuminations, somewhat in the style of As is by Paul Valéry, in Leonardo Muntaner Editor) and Complete newspapers (a volume that brings together the post-1979 dietary work, published by Quid Pro Quo Edicions). This is with regard to his own books. In translations, Formosa has recently given us his versions of the Roman Elegies by Goethe (Adesiara), from the texts of Paul Klee collected in See and know (LaBreu) and the poems of German War Primer and Other Poems, by her beloved Bertold Brecht (Tripod). All six are books with which you will give and give yourself splendid and lasting gifts this day.

You can add the Complete poetry by Josep M. Llompart (El Gall Editor) and the volume Private vocabulary, a prose cameo written jointly by Josep M. Llompart himself and the great Antonia Vicens, which is being revived by AdiA Edicions. This year, as you know, the Llompart Year is being celebrated, in commemoration of the centenary of the poet's birth, with the participation of Balearic and Catalan institutions: it was more than enough of an excuse for the President of the Generalitat (Catalan government) to dedicate an event to celebrating one of the great Catalan-language poets of the 20th century. And just as poorly remembered, etc., they are also writers of Catalan literature, because they also write in Catalan. Llompart wrote, in Catalan, excellently, and that is why the new Lompart releases that will soon be in bookstores alongside the aforementioned volumes are also excellent: the biography of Josep M. Llompart, a little man who was crying out for a work of this kind, edited by the scholar and critic. Complete, planned in six volumes to be published over the next three years by Nueva Editorial Moll, where Llompart was literary director for three decades. Formosa and Llompart are more than reliable recommendations: good morning to all.