The problem poem of Prats de Molló
The poem is the problem. When in 1969, from his exile in the United States, Josep Carner-Ribalta wants to publish L’alegre vianant,the trouble he has is with the subtitle: Geopoemes. The book is a biographical map. The places. He who was in all the places of the 20th century. But there is one that Francoism does not allow into national-prose-rubbish Spain: Prats de Molló.
Censorship cuts the poem Després de Prats de Molló. It does not appear in the book. Shall we read it now? It goes like this… “Defeated, today (as Bonaparte one day must have contemplated that very spot) sadly I have gazed at the desolate plain... What reluctance to live or dream!... He who loses a world, like the Eagle, can already find comfort having tasted victory... But what glory, what honorable mark, can the private soldier show who leaves far away – with his banners fallen in the derisive dust – unredeemed, forgotten, ill-fated in history – defeated today, yesterday and perhaps tomorrow – a homeland as small as a hand?”
He was 28 years old and had been in exile for three years. In 1926 he is arrested, tried, deported, and goes into exile again. Exiled to the cube, to an infinite power, to a tomb in transit. He crossed the border of the French Ardennes on foot. All of Luxembourg. As far as Belgium. At the temporal window of Waterloo he collapses and writes the poem. He is one of the men of the Prats de Molló events.
Josep Carner-Ribalta, lieutenant of the general staff of Francesc Macià. His right-hand man. His shadow. Since the creation of Estat Català in 1922. He goes with him to Moscow in 1925 to ask for Soviet help for independence. And they did not stop until that dream in the present continuous became a mission. Hundreds of men. Weapons. Money. And the ideal: to descend from Northern Catalonia to invade militarily, make the country independent, and proclaim the Catalan Republic. The betrayal by a Mussolini spy within the Catalan squadrons causes a chaotic flight and mass arrests. It was November 4, 1926. Carner-Ribalta’s poem is an antidepressant, but also a vitamin, a seed.
Without Prats de Molló there is no after Prats de Molló. Let us remember: the international media trial. The Catalan cause is electric neon. The ignition of the Macià myth. The republican 1931, the Statute... Without Prats de Molló there is none of this... Neither present, nor future. Prats de Molló is Plato: “To know is to remember”. Carner-Ribalta explains it: “We must convince ourselves that Spain with a republic, monarchy, dictatorship, democracy... will always go against Catalonia and will always deny us at least freedom, sovereignty, and our identity”. Prats de Molló is the proof of the truth. The carbon-14, the Rosetta stone, the crystalline ovum-spermatozoon, the genetic DNA. It is realizing the reality: there is nothing to be done.
Prats de Molló is CTRL+ALT+DEL with Spain. An action of de-lobotomization. The extraction of the chip implanted by the state in a bad state since the cradle. It is said by a professional of exile. Carner-Ribalta is a man who from adolescence until death only had one goal: “The absolute and full conviction that there is no other solution for Catalonia than independence”.
Facing extreme Spain, poetry is a weapon loaded with the future. If Spanish Francoism was bothered by a poem, Spanish democracy is bothered by a vote. This is only the tip of the Catalonia iceberg: sunken, frozen despite being real. This is the problem: the existence of a civilization that fights against barbarism. We are a poem that is not allowed to be heard.
