A Conversation with Francesc Parcerisas

Abstract

A Conversation with Francesc Parcerisas Lawrence Venuti Since the 1960s, Francesc Parcerisas has published fourteenbooks of poetry,which have won numerous awards, including the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona. His articles on con temporaryCatalan poetry have appeared in such periodicals as Avui, El Pais, and La Vanguardia. Between 1998 and 2005 he served as director of the Institute forCatalan Letters, overseeing the promotion of Catalan literature inCatalonia and abroad. He has long taught in theFacultat de Tra ducci? id'Interpretacio at theUniversit?t Aut?no ma de Barcelona, where he is currently dean. Lawrence Venuti: Your early poetry has been described as "experimental." How do you under stand that term? Francesc Parcerisas: I began writing in themid 1960s, influenced by existentialism and by what was then called "social" poetry in Spain, a social realism. The intellectual climate had links with the Beat Generation and the youth counterculture. For us, the first generation born aftertheSpanish Civil War, itwas an assertion of freedom.My poems were inspired by the Catalan Salvador Espriu and theGalician Celso Emilio Ferreirobut also by Pavese, Neruda, Hikmet. In the 1970s I felta need to connect those interests with an avant-garde lit eraryexperience. I remembervery clearly thebook Renga by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoar do Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson, which I bought inMexico in the summer of 1972. There I found some of thewriting I had been trying to achieve. The resultwas my book Latituds dels cavalls (1974; Horse latitudes). Interestingly, this experimentalism was not rooted in the contem porary French polemic about textuality,at once post-Mallarmean and academic, but rather in the youth culture of the sixties (thepeace movement, Orientalism, music, sex, drugs). I had traveled with my generation fromtheBeatles to theDoors. LV:What did experimentalism mean foryou in formal terms? FP: In Catalonia, our connection with the avant- -^pw^ garde was strongly associated with visual art (Miro, Dali) and the very popular Joan Salvat Papasseit, a lyric poet committed to calligrams and painting (heworked forawhile in an art gallery) but also to anarchism (he ran a littlemagazine called?probably afterGorky?The Enemy of the People). Therewas a hint of surrealism thatreflect ed themost widely read French poets (Breton, Eluard). The experiments I recallwere not so radical. Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" or Burroughs's cut-and-paste technique probably had some influ ence on early books of mine, like Discurs sobre lesmateries terrestres(1972; Discourse on earthly matters). But the road todislocation was too easy and finallya cul-de-sac. Since Iwas coming from political protest, this sortof experimentalism pre vented the reader from reaching any real under standing ofwhat Iwanted to say. LV:During the 1970s, then,your poetry changed to become more reflective and autobiographical, more centered in personal, day-to-day experience. FP: The return to a recognizable realitymeant a return to lyricexpressiveness. In a book likeDues 52 i World Literature Today 3 suites (1976;Two suites), I stillsought a patchwork of images, drawn from Maria Manent's transla tions fromChinese, the J Ching,Mexican texts.But the emphasis falls on emotion?love, loneliness, solitude. In L'edat d'or (1983; The golden age) I discovered the use of the third person as a means of establishing a seemingly objective distance between the poem and the reader, a literary device I took fromCavafy. Through itIwas able to frame a very personal set of images, situations, and emo tionswith which the reader could immediately identify.Ibelieve thiswas thegreat success of the book, which became a sort of poetical landmark during the 1980s. LV:Were you also responding to current trends when these formal and thematic changes were happening inyour poetry? FP:My own trajectory was unusual because I lived in Bristol for three years (1969-72) and traveled toNew York and California. But it is still true to say that, in general, our sources of information were limited. English wasn't much read, let alone English-language poetry. Many influences came ^Bf^H via French translationsand magazines. I firstread Ic^l Borges inFrench because the Argentinean editions HS^^H hadn't yet reached Spain! France and Italywere ^E^H thegreat providers of cultural references:cinema, ^K^l song, literature, intellectual debate. For my...