When they were looking for the title of the correspondence between Josep Pla and Francesc de Borja Moll, the editor Jordi Cornudella couldn’t think of the title, Accomplices per la llengua. Letters 1948-1979, would have great relevance: the alliances between PP and Vox in Valencia and the Balearic Islands have turned it, he says, into a “timely book”, because it puts the complicity and collaboration between people from the various Catalan-speaking territories in foreground, regarding the publication of the Diccionari Català-Valencia-Balea (DCVB), which Moll promoted continuing the legacy of Monsignor Antoni Maria Alcover, who had published the first two volumes.
Thus, the letters between the two, just published by Destino, reveal their mutual admiration, and also reveal the role of the Francoist mayor Josep M. de Porcioles in the culmination of the dictionary project.
The correspondence reflects shared concerns, especially around the language and especially the making of the DCVB, to which Pla places great value and in which he will be fully involved as a “propagandist”, either with articles on Destino or directly to take away a good port the new edition of the first two volumes, unfindable and incomplete. That is why, when Moll explains that Joan March has stopped subsidizing him, Pla proposes asking Porcioles, then mayor of Barcelona, ??for money. In the dozen letters exchanged between the three of them – those received and addressed to the Francoist mayor published in the annex – Moll mentions that the mayor’s father had been one of those whom Mosen Alcover called “collaborators who have little sleep.” Finally, they get 250,000 pesetas to pay for the edition, a fact that is not publicized because, writes Pla, “the Falangists and Unitarians would have attacked it, as you can already suppose.” It was the year 1963, let’s remember.
In addition, on several occasions they exchange knowledge about words to include or not in the dictionary, such as the cases of axuetat –included as aixuartat– or arrilat –which in the end did not enter–. Pla’s writings were one of the sources from which the dictionary fed and the writer was proud to find since 1953, in the 5th volume, words extracted from his work such as enrolar, ensulfatar or entrecuixar.
Beyond other issues such as the pressure of tourism in Mallorca, which Pla discussed in a series of articles, Josefina Salord, who is in charge of the edition, assures that the book “reports an intense, cordial and complicit relationship”, intensified because they shared “a natural language model, nothing baroque”. Salord insists that Pla’s Catalan identity “is basically based on the unconditional and militant adherence to the language”, “above -he writes to the introduction- the ideological thought of Josep Pla and that it is above all his intellectual and political evolution”. . The writer from Empordà points out in the letters the importance for him of knowing both Moll, in Mallorca, and Joan Fuster in Valencia: “They were clear that complicity between territories had to be established,” says Salord.
The editor Jordi Cornudella also points out that the correspondence “discovers us a militant Pla, who got very wet in difficult years”, at the same time that he was “pragmatic and possible”. In this sense, Xavier Pla, from the Josep Pla Chair at the UdG, underlines that both were “people who in difficult times do not fall into pessimism or complaints, but instead dedicate themselves to doing things and working for the future”.
Catalan version, here
