Author first of poetry and progressively of diaries – his first collection of poems was Abandonada ment, from 1977, and his first diary, Quadern venecià, winner of the Josep Pla prize in 1989 – the work of Àlex Susanna (Barcelona, ??1957) is nourished by all culture within his reach, also the work that he has done in recent years at the Fundació V ila-Casas, of which he was art director until a few months ago. Vital, has just published a new diary, La dansa dels dies (Proa), but he already has other books in perspective: “It would be ideal for the new book of poems to come out in February, Tot és atouch, and before that, the latest volume of the diaries, L’any més inesperat”.
It doesn’t stop…
The diaries form a kind of quadriptych, a series, which ends with my cancer diagnosis. It is a closed series, although it is unpredictable what the future will bring me, but the mix of vitality, curiosity and passion that I had has been damaged by the situation I am going through, and I will no longer be the same as I was.
He wrote this diary without being ill, but death often comes up as a topic…
Yes, I am very clear about where I want to end up, and even what music… It’s good to prepare it, to anticipate it, because life is very badass and it brings you surprises at the most unexpected moment. Now I am fighting to stop being terminally ill and becoming chronically ill. Imagine the moment I am in, everything I could have foreseen, as if to say, is done.
But it responds to treatment.
It seems so, but with great caution, the doctors already warn that I can take two steps forward and one step back. I spent two months with a sword of Damocles on me, and I came to internalize it and believe it, but then I recovered my spirits, and right now it is difficult for me to think that this will end soon.
In the diaries there is conversation, reading, arts, walks, landscapes… life concentrated.
They are still a celebration of conversation. For me, the diary is the type of thanksgiving, it allows me one thing I need, which is to be grateful for life. It is to thank him for the very wide range of experiences that he offers us, from the most sensory and tangible to the most intangible and metaphysical or abstract. Between the two extremes there is a very rich range.
The reader enters the world of a person who is dedicated to art and culture.
It reflects the world of someone who for many years has lived fundamentally immersed in culture, but from the maximum curiosity and interconnection between all fields. Normally you see writers locked in literature, artists locked in art, and for me it is as important to feed on literature as on music, art, architecture, theater or cinema. It is a very cultural book, yes, but also very airy, and I also try to reflect the experience of culture from as vital a point of view as possible. Culture helps me understand life and live more intensely. Life and culture are communicating vessels, I am not a wise scholar locked in a tower.
Nor is it a compilation of meetings and dates with people.
I practice dietarism almost as if I were a transgender that allows me to go from one tone and one register to another: there are fragments that are micro-stories, micro-narratives, others that can be philosophical digressions, rather journalistic chronicles, prose poems, aphorisms… And that allows me to modulate the writing for each of the experiences that I reflect. I feel like a fish in water, very comfortable.
You can jump from one topic to another without having to justify yourself as you would in an essay.
Because here the narrative voice has complete freedom. That’s all. Everything that interests me about literature I find in diaries. And, on the other hand, the fact that there are no dates or very few also gives it a rhythm. I don’t force myself to write every day, I write when I feel like it, when I have time, without an obligation that I find weighs down the journals.
Do you rewrite a lot to turn the diary into a book?
Not much. There are experiences that I transcribe the same day or the next day or in others I wait a few days. I think that this diary has a difference with respect to the previous ones, at least I as an author experienced it that way, and that is that the line, speaking in pictorial terms, is freer. I don’t have any type of brake, always being respectful.
However, he does not spare criticism either…
Yes, I say what I think, for example, about Porcel or Margarit, and if they were alive I would have said it to them, too. Margarit dies and I take the opportunity to make my portrait. I say about Porcel that someone may consider that it was an explosive cocktail of ambition, egomania, work capacity, etc., but I am not criticizing it, on the contrary, there should be more characters who wanted to take on the world, and who did.
Can they accuse you of egomania?
Deep down I don’t care. What interests me is to capture the reader through a narrative voice, through a tone, through the creation of a world, in the same way that a novel can do. Let’s not get confused, they are literary, narrative diaries, I already write knowing that it will end up being published, and for me, each fragment has to have value in itself, the whole has to be something more than the sum of all the pages, like an image mosaic that the reader has just completed. What is as important as how, when I write, and not so much whether I talk about this or that, that or the other. Sometimes there are fragments about seemingly insignificant things, and the fun is to say, “let’s see, how do I get the most out of this.” I can’t help but always be fully aware that I am making literature.
He has never stopped writing poetry, however.
Poetry is closely linked to experiences that involve some type of revelation, enlightenment, epiphany, and we will agree that as time passes the possibilities of having revelations are lower and that explains why the pace of poetic writing declines. On the other hand, unlike the diary, which I write when I want, the poem is rather the one that knocks on the door, so that, and I have been saying this for many years, if at the end of the year I have managed to write 4 or 5 poems , I’m already satisfied. It’s not necessary more. When faced with authors who fall into a kind of incontinence, especially towards the end of their lives, I am of the opinion that on the one hand an excess of production can spoil the poetic voice, as Montale said, and on the other, as Gil from Biedma, for every five or six poems you stop writing, maybe you will write a good one. I want to avoid this incontinence or verbiage into which great poets have fallen. I have no interest in that.
Maybe just one book would be enough, or just one good poem.
Exactly, like Joan Maragall’s Cant spiritual, or Salvat-Papasseit’s Tot l’enyor de demà. The poets we like the most, how many poems do we like? Let’s be aware. I really like Vinyoli, but mainly because of 15 poems that shook me and that I still like a lot today. That does not mean that the rest is dispensable, but it does mean that the objective would have to be to write this handful of good poems, for which perhaps someone, one day, will remember us. You don’t have to insist, insist, insist, it ends up turning against you.
Crop, crop, crop?
Yes, and keep quiet and only write when you really can’t help it. In that I’m a bit Rilkean, I think one of the main pieces of advice he gives in Letters to a Young Poet is “stop writing, write only when you can’t stop writing.” Between a poet and his readers there would have to be a certain withdrawal syndrome, because I have seen the opposite case in very powerful names, such as Estellés himself, Brossa, Miquel Martí i Pol, or even the latest Margarit. There comes a time when you think: “Calm down”, because I’m not excited about a new book, if I’m still digesting the previous one, that doesn’t make any sense. Ferrater, Gil de Biedma, Larkin and Cavafis, four poets who have gone down in history, wrote three books and a hundred poems. More than enough.
The names of Feliu Formosa and J.F. Yvars are constantly repeated and the reader follows his evolution as characters.
It is significant that the two references that run through this entire series of diaries are the most present. If there were a name index, they would be among those with the most entries, yes, and Òscar Tusquets and Carles Casajuana are also coming out…
Reclaims some half-forgotten artists…
It is one of the problems we have as a culture, we have more talent than market and this talent is often lost. There is an excess of attention towards emerging voices and on the other hand, from a certain age, 55 or 60, you are practically considered amortized and are invisible.
Between the emergency and the pope.
Exactly, but here we create few priests, because we are also a small country, and so there is a wide range of creators, writers, artists, composers, who suddenly find themselves in limbo, and that is not normal and should motivate a reflection. on the part of those responsible for culture of the Generalitat, of the city councils, on the one hand, and of the public institutions on the other, because it cannot be that an artist dies without having had an exhibition, which does not have to be too large , the closing of his work, in which the city and the country thank him for a lifetime dedicated to art. The same thing happens with writers, many of whom can also end up completely forgotten and destitute. I think there are very simple ways to remedy it. It is a problem of political will and awareness of the problem.
Feliu Formosa is a great creator but sometimes it’s as if he wasn’t even there…
Exactly, it is a case that cries out to heaven. That he has already won everything, yes, but he is very active, although from the margins.
If poetry is already on the margins…
Of course, and he is also a translator, playwright, dietitian… And he is aware that he writes from the margins, and he does not deserve that, he deserves to be treated for what he is, a great personality of Catalan literature.
In his work emotion is always contained.
Feelings are dangerous and I am not interested in them literarily, since they are the most fungible and deceptive thing there is. I am very reluctant, many people still talk about literature as a kind of repository of your feelings, and no. There are very few feelings here. Rilke already tells Malte Laurids Brigge’s Notebooks that poems are not made with feelings, they are made with experiences, and then comes an apotheotic paragraph in which he says that to write a single poem you have to have lived 400 nights of love with 400 bodies different, having visited many cities, having observed the diseases of creatures, etc. And in the end, we must have forgotten everything. And once you have forgotten it and all that is within you, it could be that one day you would write a verse that would be worth it.
Catalan version, here
