The former president Jordi Pujol has claimed this Tuesday that the Enciclopèdia Catalana, a project with which he collaborated from Banca Catalana with financing and business management, was a “country infrastructure” and a way of “building Catalonia”. The former president of the Generalitat has pointed out in the presentation of the book Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana. A work of the country (Editorial Base) by the Sabadell-born historian Josep LluÃs MartÃn Berbois who is very “proud” and “happy” to have contributed to the project, and has significantly valued the figure of Max Cahner, vital for it to come out forward.
In the presentation, at the Ona bookstore in Barcelona, ​​the former president went back in time to his political origins, without making references to famous passages such as that of the Tagamanent, which with the recent reissue of his diary written in prison was recalled at that time. same scenario. However, he explained that he noticed Enric Prat de la Riba from a very young age and that he took him as an example to “build Catalonia”. “I am a person who was very inspired by his nationalist and Catalan political formation by Prat de la Riba, who in a very inspiring way had the objective of making a country work”. “We have to make institutions and that was his policy at all times, to build Catalonia”, highlighted Pujol, who titled one of his books that way and has detailed that his intention in financing the encyclopedia project, about which he has recounted some interior and He has highlighted the difficulties and difficulties he went through, it was “to do an important work for the country.”
Pujol has recalled that the encyclopedia, in its initial conception, should have only three volumes, although later there were more than 20 and has claimed that the institution edited and published 32 dictionaries that allowed translations from Catalan to many foreign languages ​​such as Italian, French, German, English, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hungarian or Sanskrit, among others. As revealed by the former president and founder of Convergència, the determination to create these dictionaries was adopted after trying, on a free visit to Sweden, to award Salvador Espriu with the Nobel Prize for Literature. “Giving a sense of universality to Catalan was already very important. Later we made thematic dictionaries”, he said in this regard. On that trip to Sweden, Pujol has recounted that they sold “the merchandise” as they could, although they “dismantled” their purposes from the outset.
In addition, the former political president has confessed that he was “surprised by the things that were done” at that time, and regretted that when the project that he had started in 1968, with publications in installments, when it was completed, it was no longer as useful because immediately ceased to be used. “When the encyclopedia was finished, it had ceased to have an important part of its usefulness,” said the former Catalan president, who added that it was “an investment in a certain sense lost” because encyclopedias have not been sold for 30 years due to the irruption of Internet.
In line with the length of the work, Pujol has joked about the drought that is now affecting Catalonia, because the entry on water, written by Heribert Barrera, who was ultimately a politician from Esquerra Republicana, who was a chemist, was very long. “It never ended,” Pujol has exaggerated. “Now we would need that water”, he added just afterwards in reference to the drought.
Pujol has insisted a lot during his speeches that the first promoter of the project, Cahner, and his father were treated very badly. A version that has also been corroborated by Francesc Fontbona, who was one of the editors of the encyclopedia. The latter has detailed that the French May of 68 had repercussions among the editors, many of them young, and that Cahner “was blamed for being the capital.” “But he did an immeasurable service to the country and he left his fortune, his Tower on Iradier street was sold,” Fontbona added.
“We suffered a lot and the one who surely suffered the most was Max Cahner, and his father. They were completely ruined,” said the former president, who also stressed that he was treated unfairly by many intellectuals and stressed that he was under pressure from the administration central government and the workers. “He was criticized, treated cruelly, he was badly spoken of and treated badly by a good part of the people who worked there,” Pujol reiterated. “And with malice,” he concluded.
The author of the work, MartÃn Berbois, has highlighted that “with the encyclopedia the history of a country is discovered” and has affirmed that the project was part of the “cultural anti-Francoism”. Likewise, the historian has revealed that there were people who asked for credits to be able to pay for the encyclopedia. “Its success is also due to immigration. There are many people who came from other parts of Spanish territory who bought it,” explained MartÃn Berbois, who believes that “two things were mixed in the project: seny and rauxa.” “And that’s how things turn out because if you think about them a lot, you don’t do them,” he added. The author has also remarked that the “will” was very important for everything to go well.
Among the attendees were former Minister Joan Vallvé Ribera and former Minister Irene Rigau, who is now on the board of Enciclopèdia Catalana. The president of the board of trustees, Xavier Cambra, spoke at the end and pointed out that the institution is still in force although the encyclopedia is now online. “A very surprising thing about this story is that an encyclopedia could have been made translating the Italian one, on the other hand it was not like that,” said Cambra, who values ​​that “it is the fruit of a will to be and to see the world from the Catalan look”. “Our vision of the world from our own perspective”, he has concluded.
The presentation was led by the journalist Francesc Canosa, who pointed out that “when there is no State of its own, a para-State is created”, and that “the Catalan encyclopedia is an example of this” because “it entered many houses”.
As is usual in the events in which he has taken part in recent months, the former president has pointed out on more than one occasion that today was not a good day for him – “Today I do not have a good day”, he started -, but at the dessert has ended up intervening without papers, in which he had annotated some of the works of the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana group or the list of dictionaries. Besides, he has talked at length. “It’s better that I don’t take too long because it seems to me that I’m getting excited”, he joked after having warned that today was not his “brightest” day for the second time.
