When they were looking for the title of the correspondence between Josep Pla and Francesc de Borja Moll, the editor Jordi Cornudella couldn’t think of the title, Accomplices per la llengua. Letters 1948-1979, had great topicality: the alliances between PP and Vox in Valencia and the Balearic Islands have turned it, he assures, into a “timely book”, because it shows the complicity and collaboration between people from the various speaking territories Catalan in the foreground, around the publication of the Diccionari Català-Valencia-Balea (DCVB), which Moll promoted continuing the legacy of priest Antoni Maria Alcover, who had published the first two volumes.
Thus, the letters between the two, which has just been published by Destino, show their mutual admiration, and also reveal the role of Francoist mayor Josep M. de Porcioles in the culmination of the dictionary project.
The letter reflects several shared concerns, especially around the language and especially the preparation of the DCVB, to which Pla places great value and in which he will be deeply involved as a “propagandist”, either with articles in Destino or directly to deliver the new edition of the first two volumes, which cannot be found and are incomplete. That is why, when Moll tells him that Joan March has stopped subsidizing him, Plan suggests asking Porcioles, then mayor of Barcelona, ??for money. In the dozen or so letters between the three of them – received and addressed to the Francoist mayor published in the annex -, Moll mentions that the mayor’s father had been one of what Father Alcover called “collaborators who have little sleep” . Finally, they get 250,000 pesetas to pay for the edition, a fact that is not publicized because, writes Pla, “the falangists and unitarists had attacked it, as you can already guess”. It was 1963, remember.
In addition, on several occasions they exchange knowledge about words to include or not in the dictionary, such as the cases of sharp – included as axuartat – or arrilat – which in the end did not appear -. Pla’s writings were one of the sources from which the dictionary was nourished and the writer was proud to find there from 1953, in the 5th volume, words taken from his work such as roll, ensulphate or entrecuixar.
Beyond other issues such as the pressure of tourism in Mallorca, which Pla dealt with in a series of articles, Josefina Salord, who took care of the edition, assures that the book “gives account of an intense relationship, cordial and complicit”, intensified because they shared “a natural language model, not at all baroque”. Salord insists that Pla’s Catalanness “is basically based on the unconditional and militant adherence to the language”, “above – he writes in the introduction – the ideological thought of Josep Pla and which is above all his evolution intellectual and political”. The writer from Emporda points out in the letters how important it was for him to meet both Moll, in Mallorca, and Joan Fuster in Valencia: “They were clear that it was necessary to establish complicity between territories”, says Salord.
The editor Jordi Cornudella also points out that this correspondence “reveals us a militant Plan, which is deeply rooted in some difficult years”, at the same time that he was “a pragmatist and a possibilist”. In this sense, Xavier Pla, from the Josep Pla Chair at the UdG, emphasizes that the two interlocutors were “people who in difficult times do not fall into pessimism or complain all the time, but are dedicated to doing things and working for the future”.
