Lluís Calvo (Zaragoza, 1963) is one of the most recognized poets of the moment. He has just published two new books, one of poetry and one of essays. In Cor Pyrenees. In the poem by Fontalba i Gotanegra (Lleonard Muntaner), two characters travel through the Pyrenees from Benasque to Cap de Creus, a route between the epic and a walk in the mountains, while in the essay Transfiguracions (Edicions Poncianes) he traces a personal itinerary for Talk about your sense of spirituality. While we speak with him, the also poet Jaume C. Pons Alorda insists that “in a few years we will find people with this book following the path, from Benasque to Cap de Creus following the route of Gotanegra and Fontalba. It is not just a collection of poems, there are 6,133 verses following in the footsteps of the great creators, with meter and rhyme, and the comparisons with Verdaguer, Sagarra, even with Riba, may even be exact. But it also reads in the fearless spirit of a novel, and that’s what makes it so great.”
Literature returns to nature, Cor pirinenc maintains the trend…
Yes, even before Irene Solà, whom I appreciate very much, I spoke of the Pyrenees, of nature, because it is what I have always done, my world is this. It’s been a long time since the thing has been going around here, in my case it has sprouted in a totally natural way, perhaps someone has recently signed up as a trend. It also has an explanation, as is the world with a climatic crisis to and fro. It makes sense, that people discover nature and that humans are nature, because we are an inseparable part of it.
In the book, however, he already often describes nature as an anthill…
Yes, over-frequency comes out in the book, and criticism is made.
But should everyone have the right to the mountain to go or not?
It is a political debate. We have to preserve the sacred character of nature, which I already defended decades ago, when with a certain populism it was believed that anything could be done in nature. We must respect and protect nature, and at the same time there is the right that we proposed, to be able to enjoy it all. Basically, this book is an invitation to deeply enjoy nature, but not from consumption, but rather by making a personal journey, as they do to Fontalba i Gotanegra along the entire route, a transformation of the person in everything that defines him. , and that they are many things, but two key ideas are love and death. The two great themes of poetry, and all this in this Pyrenees, which is itself a myth for the Catalans.
And there is redemption, too.
Yes, it is a very important idea, and very lost, like so many other things that moved the world, such as the idea of mercy or helping others, of charity, for example. They are words that have been left out of place. What these characters do is achieve their redemption, purge all the sorrows that we all have, through the journey. It is a pilgrimage, an idea that also appears in Transfiguracions because it begins with an ascent to Serra Cavallera, which has continuity with the Taga, which Santiago Rusiñol had already climbed, before his famous trip by car with Ramon Casas, through some of the Pyrenean counties such as Ripollès, Berguedà or Cerdanya. At that time climbing any mountain was already a mythical thing. In any case, there is the idea of a journey, a journey, a pilgrimage.
We also have an epic poem, but from a contemporary epic, reduced to facts that are not exactly heroic… The form is epic, the circumstances perhaps not so much…
Well, yes, things happen to them… But this is the idea, what I wanted from the outset was to create some very human characters, that what could happen to them was what would happen to us going through the Pyrenees, they are people of flesh and bone, at least I’m not a great athlete, I didn’t want a Kilian Jornet here, which is fantastic but it wouldn’t have fit in here.
It’s anti-epic, even…
In postmodernity that is already epic, people look for the epic in this return to nature, doing the Trans-Pyrenees or the Camino de Santiago… They are forms of contemporary epic, which are related to a hero, but today doing this journey walking is a heroic act, when we all have a thousand comforts. But here there are no fabulous beings, we have become disbelievers… or yes they are, but through drugs, which is a connection that all cultures have had since ancient times with magic, with what happens to us, with the world of mystery, so I could wink at Verdaguer and the world of fairies. At the end of the 19th century there was a boom with the theme of fairies and fantastic beings: Jaume Massó i Torrent wrote the libretto for an opera by Enric Morera, La fada, for example. Or Apel les Mestres, the opera Canigó by Carner or the Cançó d’amor i de guerra, which is taking place at Vallespir… I wanted to pull this thread, but I also had Goethe’s Faust and his night of Walpurgis…
But you had made this entire journey, before?
I have been in the Pyrenees for decades, but I have not done it all in one go. In some places I must have been seventy times and some other only once. The real origin of the book is Jaume Pons Alorda, who called me one day. Maria Muntaner, the editor, reserved a date for me to release a book in 2022, and I wanted to do something different, due to maturity, age, career, something that will be a legacy for people who come after. And commenting on it with Jaume, she said: “Make a long poem because the Catalans get horny with long poems”. Verbatim. “With meter and rhyme,” she added.
But the itineraries are not a novelty in his work.
The truth is that in a long poem you can do whatever you want, but I immediately thought that what I know is the Pyrenees. Let’s not complicate life and be authentic. And so it is born. I love itinerary ideas, I’m a geographer and I have this distortion. In fact, in all my books itineraries can be traced. Even for Barcelona, in Última oda a Barcelona, with Jordi Valls, which is an axis that makes us see an unknown city. I have done itineraries through the Pyrenees, Australia or Peru.
Transfiguracions is also a journey, especially through India, Nepal, Japan. And it fits well with this Eastern spirituality.
I really like to start from the local, if we want some kind of universality, we will find it as Catalans with what we have nearby, and that has been shown historically.
We are bound by tradition…
There is a lot here, but there are also nods to the contemporary world, I wanted a book that was of today and that is why when young people speak they do so with their feca, random, semat… and instead the peasants seem to speak as in the XIX century, each one with its register. It is a wealth that we have. At the same time, Catalonia is forged nationally and mythically from the Pyrenees and from the idea of the expulsion of the Saracens, as can be seen in Verdaguer’s Canigó. In the 19th century, the Pyrenees was seen as a fascinating place but full of dangers, fantastic and terrible beings, as can also be seen in Les bruixes de Carançà, by Antoni Jofre, an almost impossible to find but very interesting book.
Where do the characters come from?
There are two key ideas in the novel: that it is a novel in verse and that the two characters are very contrasting. One, Fontalba, more idealistic, more romantic and dreamy, and the other, Gotanegra, who sells insurance, a totally pragmatic guy. And then you see how through the trip they are transformed and end up taking things from each other. I wanted two great contrasting protagonists, who give a lot of play, and some luxury secondary characters, such as Alberta, a girl they meet along the way, and Clara, who is never there. In fact, in the book the women govern, who are the ones who move the thread of the narrative.
They transfigure one into the other, well…
In part, yes, and the word transfigured appears several times in the book, and links it to the Transfiguracions essay. The reader identifies with the characters and makes them his own.
There is also fun…
Yes, with funny parts. When one does such a brutal thing, one has to have many models, and one was Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, in which many things happen… But there are also more tragic moments, and of thought, philosophy, reflection, philology, botany, geology … It’s like a dish that has to be as balanced as possible, as precise as possible so that everything has flavor and the components that are needed, and gradually dose it so that it works as perfectly as possible as a gear.
The narrator, who is a certain Lluís Calvo, also sticks his head out…
Yes, he is asking permission to say his things. It’s a way of laughing at myself, when they say that “You, Calvo, should tell the story (…) You can give it a precise touch, with a trace.”
It’s a great clown, too.
It is the theater within the theater, of course, or the poem within the poem. I had to explain why I was the narrator without having been on the trip.
In the book there is no deity, but in the end it is the mountain, in a way…
Yes, it is implicit, it has its spiritual moments, like when they meet a Zen master, or Alberta herself… there are two koans… Whoever wants can pull many strings.
Above all in Transfiguracions there is spirituality, but without religion.
No official religion. Spirituality is carried inside, it is there, until a moment comes when it is made explicit. The essay wanted it to be very experiential, and that is why I start with an itinerary that is an ascent, and in the end I end up talking about the body, I make a claim. In the middle there is a deposit of readings, but also of what I have seen on trips. I disembark there and explain what I have seen. I always keep spirituality as a very personal thing, like a very internal alchemy, it belongs to each one and not a dogma that comes from outside. You are like a forge and everything is cooking there.
It is the body, too.
Yes, the body is the microcosm, which connects with the macro.
The Transfiguracions journey is indeed yours.
Yes, at the beginning the book was a kind of travel diary about the reality of many visions and religions that I had been investigating, with readings and stays. In any case, I identify a lot with Hinduism, but at the same time there is Christianity, by training, and Buddhism. It is not a strange trinity, it is the one that Raimon Pànikkar had, and he transmitted it by uniting many things, because from the difference they have many points in common. In the end, and I also say this in the book, all religions are approximations, tentative attempts to reach a reality that is ultimately inexpressible.
With a lot of common sense.
It is being focused on the here and now, each moment is unique and each moment has to be precious and magical and we cannot be thinking about the past or the future, which is where the mind continually leads us, to be out of focus ourselves.
Fontalba and Gotanegra end up being where they are…
Yes. The animal, instinctive part, which is losing more and more, is what keeps us rooted in the here and now, and in the earth. We have lost the connection with the common sense of living life with a certain balance, and that has a lot to do with the development of capitalism and the industrial revolution: always looking for something more that we don’t have, always more. The idea of improvement and progress, and perhaps progress is elsewhere.
But the notion of progress and moving forward has also pushed you to make a work like Cor pirinenc, right?
Yes, but that is spiritual and literary progress. It is also true that we have lost the idea of art linked to the community, where everyone makes their contribution. The indigenous communities had it very much in mind and each one contributed to the art anonymously and the important thing was not the production, but the connection with the forces that pass through the community and with the ancestors, the tradition. All that we are we have received.
Why does creation have to have a general scope?
Yes, universal and local at the same time. When Catalonia has gone far is when we have started to create from the individual and collective point of view. There is always an impulse, instead of gall, faith, in the country, in us, in what we do, because if not, only acrimony and impotence remain.
At Edicions Poncianes they trust you to ensure that Transfiguracions is their “authentic magnum opus, the book that culminates all their production and that means the true compendium of their philosophical and poetic journey”. And before reaching the age of sixty, there is nothing!
That’s the publisher, and Laia Llobera… But some didn’t even reach forty, like Andreu Vidal. It is now, what must be done. We are a very necrophiliac culture, and I can’t stand it. We tend to honor people when they are dead or when they are about to die. And no. Things have to be celebrated when people are healthy and in fullness. I’m not twenty years old, it’s now when I can try to do things that I think are important. If later I do better works, then perfect. A book like this has not been done by everyone.
Catalan version, here
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