“It is essential to remember that Ferrater never refused to present himself as a writer, as a poet and as a linguist when necessary, but he never spoke of himself as a literary critic or as a literary historian.” It is Jordi Cornudella, editor of Gabriel Ferrater. Papers on literature (Edicions 62), who explains the secrets of the poet from Reus, author of Les dones i els dies.
Cornudella knows that this book makes Ferrater an unavoidable literary reference. The work more than expands, with 200 unpublished pages out of 600, the volume On Literature, which his brother Joan Ferraté published in 1979, and which he completed with subsequent works. “In his lifetime, Gabriel Ferrater only published poetry – Cornudella explains to La Vanguardia – and his brother divided his later work into three large areas: literature, painting and language.”
Cornudella recognizes: “These Papers on literature are a betrayal. They turn Ferrater into the critic or historian that he did not want to be, and they make him the author of a work that is not a work and that to a large extent we are certain that he did not want it to be. “Gages of posterity.” This “work that is not a work” is what the editor has worked hard to make clear, identifying each text in detail, so that the current reader knows the context and intention of how they were written, whether for public or private purposes.
Cornudella has divided the book into three parts: a first on Catalan literature, a second on personal papers (“Ferrater doing Ferrater”) and a third on other literatures. “His brother differentiated the texts of the conferences and I have wanted to preserve that duplicity: in 2019 the Curs de Literature Catalan contemporània was published, a compilation of conferences on various writers (Riba, Foix, Guerau de Liost…), and now the texts that we already knew plus a lot that we have found, that had never been published. Now we need to collect all the reading reports and all the articles that she wrote in Spanish for a Salvat writers’ dictionary, which remain unpublished.
The most unique and unpublished writings in this volume are those in the third part, dedicated to other literatures: “The Labor publishing house published a history of the literature of a German author, Erwin Laaths, where texts by other authors were added. Ferrater was in charge of expanding with interesting information for the reader here the articles by a few foreign authors that Laaths had already included. By comparing the German and Spanish editions, we have managed to know what Ferrater added.”
“Another unpublished article is an extensive article entitled Notes on the poetry of Josep Carner – he continues –, which we found thanks to the collaboration of Mercè Comas, the daughter of Antoni Comas, who found two letters between her father and Ferrater that cited him, and that He gave us the clue. This article served for a dictionary entry that was not published and for the famous prologue to Nabí. It is a piece of big game, as is the part of Ausiàs March, which had a great influence on his own work.”
The main conclusion of this volume is that “although Gabriel Ferrater never published anything about literary criticism or the history of literature, he had a decisive influence on the formation of the modern canon: neither Carner nor Foix would occupy the place they occupy today in Catalan literature. if he had not warned us about his work,” he concludes.
Catalan version, here
