Barcelona Metropolis

That is what I have been searching for, even since childhood. Why do I write some poems and not others? Or rather, why am I who I am and not someone else? That is a universal question, which everyone can ask. And why is the city of Barcelona the way it is and not some other way? That is also a serious question that must be posed and one that the Catalans as a people don’t ask often enough. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, not of Macedonia, and it is how it is because that is what the Catalans are like. The concept of being Catalan two centuries ago was very restrictive, but now it is much broader. Now a Catalan is someone who has been living for some time in Catalonia. For how long? This is another matter.

Yes, fortunately these things no longer mean very much. Now your life’s path is what is important.

Yes, because even though I moved around a lot in my early years, I planted my roots here. At a certain point I even spoke Spanish with a Canarian accent, but I lost it just as quickly. I only lived in the Canary Islands for two years, and for the next five years I went there when I could, because you got there by boat so it took at least six days, and sometimes 13, if you went with a merchant.

After the Spanish Civil War was over, I lived in Sant Gervasi, in a narrow street called Passatge de Sant Felip, I still remember, when I was three, four, five years old. I have few memories of that, but they are set in stone. They have nothing to do with the gardens and houses that Mercè Rodoreda speaks of so powerfully: she talks about well-to-do people that were not around where I lived.

During the first 10 years of my life, I was not rooted anywhere, so I was shaped by being “always on the move,” which basically means being lonely. If you change where you live, you almost don’t go to school, and I had only completed two years of school by the time I was 10. The other consequence is that you have no friends. And if your mother is barely there, you have to fully rely on yourself with regard to learning things. It’s not that you miss love, and it’s not that you are miserable, at all, because kids are miserable when they are beaten or not fed. If you don’t have a friend who has a bicycle and shows you that you don’t have one...

Turó Park was also about 15 years old. It was still beautiful and lush, and had not become the place for dogs that it is now. Once democracy arrived, Turó Park turned into a place for dogs. For me, that’s a metaphor.

When Barcelona swallowed Sarrià and Gràcia, there were still quiet places. The problem comes when new neighbourhoods are created at full speed and poorly. It is one thing to engulf a small village. It is quite another for immigrants to come and build a neighbourhood on the fly. This happened first with immigrants from Murcia and from inner Catalonia, and later from Andalusia. It led to the neighbourhoods of Besòs, Montjuïc, Can Tunis, Somorrostro. Franco’s government saw the need to make neighbourhoods for immigrants, but it did so poorly.

I have a two-sided relationship with Barcelona. The fact that I love it is proved by my poem “Retorn de vacances” [Returning from Holidays”], in which the speaker returns from Mallorca by boat and arrives in Montjuïc. I have two daughters buried in the Montjuïc Cemetery. A city whose main mountain is where I buried two daughters... it cannot be a city that does not love me, even if I have to go live elsewhere. Not too far away [since 1975, he has lived in Sant Just Desvern]. Now it’s an issue of mayors who don’t want to give up power, because the logical thing would be for the entire metropolitan area to form a single municipality... Like all relationships, it is one of love and hate.

Poetry, like everything else, like prose, mechanics and physics, requires life. What kind of life? Not just any will do. All lives can interfere to some degree. If you want to spend your life travelling the world, working in an office is not going to go well for you. If I have to write poetry, I have to look where there is no interference. So I sought out the part of architecture that would help me better in poetry. Taking this to the extreme, if I had been a decorator, it would not have inspired my poetry… Poetry is not life, which is something the romantics get wrong. You have to be careful with artists, because they might be great artists when they are very young, but that does not mean that you need to let them sweep you away. You also don’t need to ask Keats at 23 years of age if poetry and life are the same.

Yes, I worked hard and I enjoyed it. My partner and I brought the first big computers to Barcelona, in around 1966, to the School of Architecture, paid for by the Architects’ Association of Catalonia, because the government had no money... They were machines that calculated what a mobile phone can do today. And they were as big as grand pianos. I saw that same computer, the IBM 1620, in a museum at Boston University, and I was overcome. Here I never saw it again. I’m sure they threw it away. We Catalans are a people very much in love with ourselves, with a certain aesthetic sense of ourselves, or of the world. It is what Unamuno referred to when he wrote: “Iberians of the Mediterranean, you’re losing your aesthetic,” and what has made it so that the only remaining Modernista café is Cafè de l’Òpera, and that’s because the owner is interesting. What has become of L’Oro del Rin, El Vienés and El Glaciar? Where have they all gone? In all the other cultural cities of Europe, Paris and Venice, they too got the best out of them, and especially money. Here the great Modernista cafés have all gone to pot, with Catalans who say: “I’m so smart.” But they’re not smart in any way.

The irresponsibility of letting people build on riverbeds. The river did not have to go looking for the dead outside, but found them at home. This made me think about the relationship between architecture and security. If you go to poetry, it is candy. It is the relationship of the safety of life itself.

It deals with the issue. I did the same for houses what I did for poetry. My work as an architect was to ensure the buildings’ safety: dealing with the wind, protecting against earthquakes, everything that can damage a building. Poetry comes to be security in life: dealing with suffering, with emotional risk… What poetry gave to me that I didn’t expect is that you can go to the most unlikely place, let’s say Madrid, and suddenly a man stops you and says that he doesn’t want to bother you, but he thanks you because at some point your poems saved his life. Nothing can compare to that. That is why I write. That saying, “love one another”, how do you do that? I know how to love my wife, my children and I stop counting. Life has brought me to here to stay and I ignore the rest. But poetry is a tool for loving. Those poets who say: “I write for myself.” What nonsense! There is nothing more boring than reading to yourself. You have to read to yourself when you work, because you have no choice, but once the poem is finished, that’s it. I read Rilke for salvation...

Rilke showed me that and at first I didn’t believe it, but later I saw that he was right: poetry is the spoken word. Poems have to be heard. I recommend that poetry be read out loud.

The audience can even be counterproductive. If you’ve listened to music in a small committee, if you’ve been to a small concert with five or six other people... when you have experienced something like that, you don’t change it. The great auditorium, with its very expensive entrance and sublime performers, can hurt you. Music is not just Grigori Sokolov, though I love him very much. Why can’t there be some small imperfection in normality?

Yes, but now the solemnity of classical music has come to jazz, and the proof is that at some point it would have been absurd to listen to jazz in the Palau de la Música. I remember going to Sala Europa in Lleida, when it existed, to see some jazzmen who later played in the Palau. I would go to Lleida to listen to them and come back to Barcelona, ​​because it was more authentic.

You’re right. Let’s run with it. That would give me a lot of freedom to search, but when sending it there is only the word, and it can’t be just any word. The combinations are endless, and in music you can put them all together. In poetry, an avant-garde type will tell you that you can also put all of them together. But that’s a lie.

Try to find consolation for the death of your daughter in an abstract painting! No, because it is not the terrain of your suffering. It is in another terrain, one of your imagination, one of many things, but it has nothing to do with it.

Aesthetic power, but what is that worth? It can be a symbol, but I’m looking for consolation, and I know what it is: I know that it hurt me before and now it doesn’t hurt me, or it hurts me less. I have enough stories. And for all the rest you have to go using other things that are very worthy, but that lie elsewhere. I have nothing against it, but if on the day my daughter died you had given me a Tàpies painting... However, a Cézanne painting would have worked. And I know that there are people who value this stuff very much, and I have nothing against it. Consolation in solitude and human indigence in the world is a very concrete subject, and it is touched on by all the arts.

In poetry it has a very clear meaning. There is a type of reader who wants you to set up a kind of container in which you put as little as possible, because he wants to put in what he has. That does not interest me. The reader is the centre of the poetic avant-garde. This is because there is a reader who says: “Leave the poem empty. Leave the structure of the poem alone, and I will fill it in.” I want to receive the poem from the beginning to the end. I already know that a good poem has infinite readings, and I don’t have to worry about it. It's like a Van Gogh, a Rembrandt, a good novel. You can read it at age 20, 30, 40, and it's always the same novel but it doesn’t tell you the same thing.

Yes, and in old age becomes very noticeable. The extension of our lifespan has produced a curious phenomenon, which is that many people have improvised and discovered that they have 30 years of life left, from their 60s to their 90s, without working or anything, and they had not prepared for it. But you have to prepare. Now society is full of “old idiots”, which is an expression of mine, but I don’t mean they are stupid. It is dramatic for many people. And to prepare for it, there is only culture.

They made it hard for me from the beginning. I started writing when I was 18, but I published my first book of my complete works when I was 40!

I didn’t stop, no, I messed it up. Because I was unaware of something in that there was no bibliography, and you have to write in your mother tongue. Probably not prose, but definitely poetry. All great poets write in their mother tongue. Nobody tells you this. It doesn’t happen anywhere else, just with the Catalans. People who have their own language but not their own state, and with the level of culture that this language has... I know of no other case of it.

Yes, but they were wrong. The day that Miquel Martí i Pol showed me... I had been writing for 20 years. And when I started in Catalan, I had another terrible period, which came from having realised that. A long time passed until I got the hang of it. Such is life.

When something looks like your mother tongue without being it, but almost, then Franco comes and from age four on they won’t let you speak Catalan. Niño, habla en cristiano. [Son, speak plainly.] The Spanish language is the only good thing that Franco brought, and I would never go back, no matter how much of a separatist I may be. Later, I saw that I had to make the first thrust in Catalan, but then I could write the poem in both languages.

No, they are two different worlds. Many years ago, we should have warned that we were going down the wrong path. Those from here and those from there. I lived through a golden age with the beginning of democracy, when we held meetings and congresses, in Sitges, in Àvila... Later, at the University of Lleida, Pere Rovira held some events every year where many of us met and became friends: Carlos Marzal, Vicente Gallego, Antonio Jiménez Millán, Luis García Montero... We met and later we went to Granada, Almería... I have recited my poetry more in the secondary schools of Andalusia than in Barcelona. I have never read in the schools of Sant Just. No one ever asked me.

I don’t have the time to keep up with them. I have my own life, the life of a poet, and one that won’t last much longer. If I’m already tired of watching the news on television... I need time to sleep, to rest, to look at the patio, to remember... All these things are much more important that giving a recital at the Palau de la Música.

This is the country we live in. As an architect, which I still am, you can commission me to build a skyscraper 50 or 100 storeys high and make me a millionaire, and the Treasury won’t be able to touch my pension as a professor at the School of Architecture. However, they’ll catch me giving recitals, and for earning more than a minimal interprofessional salary, they’ll take my pension away. It’s punishment. What a country! We live in a society that views culture as a luxury.