“I believe in a god, and he is Harold Pinter,” he says in theater courses. Josep Maria Miró is a polytheist and also believes in David Lynch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sarah Kane.
But the Bible he has is the one from Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat. Her mother asks for it because it’s from when she got married, and he pretends to be clueless because the Bible must be at hand. As an art lover, he is a great defender of religious culture (not of the institution or of the hierarchy).
For this reason, in the dining room, at the foot of a 16th century Spanish oil painting on wood that represents Saint Sebastian, are the guides to identify the characters and scenes of Christian iconography, “the who is who of the stories.” holy.” Faith is something else: “Am I a believer? I am not practicing? No. Am I an atheist? Don’t know”.
The first Premi Born he obtained, in 2009, helped him pay for this apartment in Poble Sec. He decided that he would not hang anything on the walls, now full of originals of Catalan illustration. She likes the old.
In the office that leads to the bedroom, there is a Penguin refrigerator from the 1950s, an American oak desk from the early 20th century, and a library converted into a sanctuary.
Among awards, a Shakespeare caganer and objects from his travels, there are photos of his friends, biological parents and the ‘spiritual’ ones: Xavier Albertí and Josep Maria Benet i Jornet.
They and the translator Laurent Gallardo were his first readers. Miró began to write The most beautiful body that has ever been found in this place the day that Benet and Jornet died, in full confinement.
When I still didn’t know that I would end up feeling very loved and protected by him, reading his Revolta de bruixes in high school – Vic’s Jaume Callís – was a revelation; Unlike the Golden Age, that was a familiar language, with characters who spoke like their people, about things they understood: “Papitu acts as a bridge between tradition (Sagarra, Guimerà, Rodoreda, Pitarra) and contemporaneity.” That is why the volume that includes twenty-one of his works is the most important on the shelf reserved for the Teatre Reunit de Arola.
As a child, Miró spent his afternoons in the Prats de Lluçanès library drawing on the back of calendars.
I read The Five, Tom Sawyer, I wrote. From a peasant family, he was the first with university studies.
He worked at Radio Nacional while Aznar was in government, “an absolutely manipulative management warned me, in the demonstrations against the Iraq war, that only the figures of the government delegation were given there.”
Regarding the profession, his reference is On Photography, by Susan Sontag, and some titles related to the Balkans, where he volunteered in the summers of 1996 and 1997. He left journalism for what made him happy: theater.
Link books to places and people. Jo, transvestite, for example, incorporates a text from The Useless Journey, by Camila Sosa, whom she came across through the editors of the Argentine Documenta.
He has premiered in Uruguay more times than in Madrid, and there he discovered Felisberto Hernández, “a fascinating character and great writer, like Mario Levrero.” Lluïsa Cunillé had given him El astillero, by Onetti. And when he returned, he brought her the complete Poetry of Idea Vilariño, who was her lover (between the pages, a mysterious paper says in a handwriting that is not Miró’s: “les cuixes”).
Katty Kowaleczko, actress of Archimedes’ Principle in Chile, left him an envelope with the poetry of Gabriela Mistral and Serenata cafiola, by Pedro Lemebel, from whom he later gave I am afraid torero six or seven times.
He began reading Carrère through his neighbor, the actor Albert Prat, who made him godfather to his son Juli. During the waiting time, Miró wrote a diary for the boy, and when he mentioned it to Carme Elías, she told him: “Tell her that today you have met a woman who is disappearing.”
For The Men and the Days, by Vilaseca, he got hooked on Camins de França, by Puig i Ferreter, “one of the great Catalan hits of the literature of the self”.
He likes Manuel Puig, “all of Sagarra’s articles are great, and the level of language in Víctor Català’s stories is very amazing.”
He is fascinated by authors who speculate about language, and not so much by those who limit themselves to using it only as a way to create a plot: “When you feel that someone has written for you, you go crazy.”
