With one hundred years of history and four hundred and forty volumes, the Bernat Metge Collection of Greek and Latin classics is one of the phenomena of Catalan culture that should cause the most astonishment. How can something like this exist between us? After all, the vast majority of the world’s languages ​​do not have any comparable collection of classics, let alone minority languages. The humanist Carles Miralles wrote that the Bernat Metge was “an undertaking that should have seemed impossible.” As other people say, if it went ahead it’s probably because its promoters didn’t know, that it was impossible. Above all, the two people who launched the project did not know it: Francesc Cambó, the patron who financed it, and Joan Estelrich, the Mallorcan intellectual who directed it and set the general criteria. Significantly, neither of them was a classical philologist. One of the most important people in the history of the collection, the poet, translator and literary critic Carles Riba, did know that everything was impossible; fortunately, while the Bernat Metge was brewing, he was in Germany and could not do more than warn by letter, like a chorus of tragedy, of the dangers of excessive ambitions.
To understand where this project came from, we must look back, towards the vibrations that surround the adjective classic. Although its use is ancient, around 1800 it acquired a new and decisive meaning in Europe: it came to designate an idealized vision of Greco-Roman Antiquity, the serene and noble world of white marble statues, a supreme civilization where reason and sensibility, form and matter. Today we know that the statues and temples of Greece were painted in bright colors and that the purity of white marble was something that did not interest the ancients at all, but that imaginary vision became an object of desire for European national cultures in training.
It is thanks to this background that the classics played such an important role during the foundational period of contemporary Catalan culture (1868-1939). Then a fascination for a certain more or less fanciful Hellenic world spread, which we can find in thinkers and creators such as Antoni GaudÃ, Miquel Costa i Llobera and Eugeni d’Ors. The statue of the Greek god Asclepius unearthed in Empúries in 1909 was hailed as a virgin found heralding a new era of national growth.
Francesc Cambó, one of the most ambitious politicians of the moment, realized the potential of these ideas when the star of his party, the Regionalist League, was already beginning to decline. Perhaps Cambó understood that, given the fragility and uncertainties of political action, it was necessary to carry out cultural projects that aspired to last, whatever the political regime under which the Catalans lived. And what could seem more enduring than the Greek and Latin texts that had been devotedly preserved for millennia?
In a country with a rudimentary university and weak, fledgling institutions, the project might seem like sheer folly. But Cambó found the ideal person to carry out a madness like that, Joan Estelrich, a twenty-five-year-old self-taught enthusiast who, despite not being an expert in classics, was dominated by a passion for classicism. Estelrich was the one who adopted almost all the decisions that determined the characteristic appearance of the Bernat Metge, taking as a model the Collection des Universités de France, the famous Guillaume Budé: the original text (Greek or Latin) and the Catalan translation in collated pages, accompanied critical apparatology and notes. Estelrich believed that Catalan culture, lacking a powerful Renaissance and isolated for four “sterile centuries†from the great European currents, felt more than any other the need for the “solid nourishment†of the classics. It was through this “classical ingredient†that the letters in the country’s language would rise to the level of the hegemonic European cultures. The operation of launching in search of lost time, to fill the gap of tradition that the intellectuals of the moment saw behind them, was felt as a duty. The very designation of the Bernat Metge naturally embodies this ideal: it takes the name of that Catalan medieval author who, in Estelrich’s understanding, was closest to the ideals of European humanism and the Renaissance.
The first volume, De la natura, by the epicurean Latin philosopher Lucretius, was published in 1923, edited and translated by the most competent Catalan Latinist of the time, Joaquim Balcells. That novelty had a considerable resonance, at home and abroad, and became the center of a vehement controversy. Some up-and-coming Catholics, led by the great linguist Antoni Maria Alcover, mercilessly attacked Balcells and Bernat Metge for precisely starting with the edition of a “blasphemous and impious” author, of an “atheist” who contaminated the entire project from the beggining. The translator, of Christian convictions, was not amused by that onslaught: he rightly believed that Lucretius was a critic of the corrupt paganism that surrounded him, a kind of moralist. The discussion shows the ability of the classics to place itself, centuries later, at the center of conflicts.
In those early years, a corpus of translations was formed such as had never existed in modern Catalan: Lucretius, Cicero, Plato, Seneca, Tibullus, Propertius, the two Plinies, Tacitus, Plutarch, Horace, Ovid, Demosthenes, Aeschylus. Among the first collaborators, the poet Carles Riba soon established himself as one of the most important humanists in the history of Catalan letters. Among his numerous translations of those founding years, the one he made of all the tragedies of Aeschylus stands out, an impressive example of recreating the archaic and abrupt style of the great Greek writer in a modern language.
As is well known, the Civil War destroyed the world from which the Bernat Metge had emerged. When the coup took place, Cambó and Estelrich were abroad and, upon learning of the revolution that had broken out in Catalonia, they supported the rebel generals. Meanwhile, the republican Generalitat confiscated the publishing house to guarantee continuity and appointed Carles Riba “appropriation commissioner”. During the war some volumes still came out, but the victory of the nationals stopped the Bernat Metge. Carles Riba, expelled from the University of Barcelona, ​​had to go into exile. Cambó, who despite his position during the conflict felt contempt for the general and his followers, never returned to live in Spain. Estelrich was the liaison and tried to take steps with the new authorities so that they would allow the publication of the collection.
It was not until the end of World War II, when the regime lost its fascist allies and was forced to ease the repression, that the collection was republished, taking advantage of the fact that it went directly to subscribers’ homes. , without having any specific permission from censorship.
With the deaths of Francesc Cambó (1947), Joan Estelrich (1958) and Carles Riba (1959), an era of the Bernat Metge came to an end. Now under the protection of Helena Cambó and her husband Ramon Guardans, the volumes continued to come out, at a rate that used to oscillate between three and six a year. Without the resonance of before the war, the new books often had a more academic approach. Those were the years in which Miquel Dolç translated Virgil’s Aeneid and Jaume Berenguer translated TucÃdides’ Historia de la guerra del Peloponès.
Framed in the Institut Cambó from 1999, the collection reached the 21st century. Under the direction of Francesc Guardans, it expanded its dissemination through a special kiosk collection that was brilliantly successful. The cultural capital accumulated over decades by the Bernat Metge allowed it to be acquired in 2017 by the cooperative group Som*. At that time, La Casa dels Clà ssics was founded, the entity that gives continuity to the Bernat Metge and disseminates the classics in all possible formats. Since the summer of 2021, after the merger between Abacus and Som*, La Casa dels Clà ssics is a unique project promoted by Abacus.
With all this legacy behind it, publishing books, programming various activities and organizing the Clà ssics Festival, today La Casa dels Clà ssics wants to put the classics at the center of contemporary culture. Translating, recreating, rethinking, reaching new audiences, agitating with the power of texts from the past, giving depth and perspective to the present: all of this is part of their mission. This is what Bernat Metge did in the twenties, when he was born, and it is a task that today, in a time dominated by the myth of immediacy, makes more sense than ever.
