Joan Ferraté, els nois i els dies
Joan Ferraté, els nois i els dies
Goggle trans –> Zorba’s was a pub near the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. Joan Ferraté taught there since the beginning of 1962. At the end of the sixties, Zorba’s was a fashionable place; you could eat and drink there, there were concerts and dancing. On the night of Monday, January 12, 1970, Ferraté went to dinner there. A guy came in with the intention of making a phone call. They introduced him there and the boy explained that he didn’t know where he would sleep. At a quarter to nine Ferraté said he was leaving, the boy said again that he didn’t know where to spend the night and he invited him home. “I had never done anything like this.” They went to sleep in the same bed. Ferraté caressed him, kissed him and then put his hand in his shorts. The boy turned, they embraced and made love
The scene was described by Ferraté himself after a week and a half in the diary he started writing to record the relationship with Daniel J. Szostakiwsky. That relationship is the origin of the verses in the Book of Daniel (1976) and that diary, which he reread several times and typed years later, is the core of the volume Del desig, published posthumously. Now reissued is the fascinating Reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, an interpretation of the poem connected to his erotic experience. This year marks the centenary of his birth.
On January 25, 1970, Ferraté begins to meditate in his diary on what the realization of his wish has entailed. “Even more incredible is that this love, my first fully satisfied love, came exactly when it was needed and in the way it was needed. Not too late, no, and truly incorporating my oldest and deepest hope.” What we know about that pederastic relationship is what the adult detailed in his personal papers. Joan Ferraté was 45 years old, that Ukrainian boy, 16. It is not easy to determine whether there was consent, but it is clear that, as he recounts it, it was a sordid relationship, with moments of selfishness and brutality.
From that moment, be that as it may, the fulfillment of the old hope would become the core of his biography, shadowed by a conscious “paranoid susceptibility”. The essential Ferraté – which is projected through some of the milestones of Catalan essayism of the 20th century – arises from the obsessive meditation on that hope.
Joan Ferraté, born on November 24, 1924, was the second child of a marriage of the declining bourgeoisie of Reus. The history of the family, with possessions in Reus and Almoster and with a good library, no one has explained better than Ramon Gomis, who is now publishing the demystifier El jove Gabriel Ferrater, la legenda. If when the Civil War broke out the older brother was 14 years and 2 months old, he was 11 and 7. If Gabriel Ferrater lived it with friends as an accelerator of adolescence, his brother spent it isolated in the chalet in the field After a short stay in Barcelona (he took with him Carner’s books, dedicated to Josep Maria de Sagarrra, which he found in the house where they took refuge) and a couple of years with his family in Bordeaux, he returned alone, with a high sense of responsibility, and finished high school at Valldemia de Mataró boarding school, in Barcelona and Reus.
“It must have been, I think, around the age of sixteen or seventeen that I began to imagine true orgies of love for boys, without ever, however, wishing for anything more than to be allowed to love them, without having to be- ne estimate”, he recalls in a maturity diary. “My sensibility had been formed”. He had become aware of it during the darkest Francoism, a stage of absolute castrating morality. In the summer of 1943, when he was eighteen, he destroyed his texts. He had found them too tempestuous, his lack of self-love pushed him. He uses these words, which say without saying but which hide what was not meant to be said: to survive, between depression and madness, an anguish he feared. Deep hope, like a seed sown in dry soil, was the experience of desire. Frustration unsettled him and the only solace he would find in the most faithful company: Carner’s verses that reconciled him with reality.
The “act of faith” with his writings is explained in the first entry of the oldest diary, kept at the University of Girona (where his personal library is also located). It is dated July 27, 1944, during the first summer after starting his law degree. That day I had reread The Songs of Maldoror. It could be “abominable (from a moral point of view)”, but that is not what impressed him. He was moved that for Lautréamont nothing had mattered more than his “appreciation” for himself. Ferraté was impressed that he had told his truth. Contemplating himself in the mirror of literature, he questions himself by asking himself this question: “why, until now, this fear of surrealism (I am aware of what I say)? Actually, the question is pointless because I already have the answer: but this one scares me a little.” To face it, in tension and introspection, he wrote and read, trying to objectify his sensibility to control it rather than to live it.
Read and write to understand each other. It cannot be by chance that he obtained the May 1944 issue of the magazine Fontaine in which Margarite Yourcenar made known more poems by Cavafy, the poet he had first discovered thanks to his brother, whom he would talk about with Carles Riba and who he would end up translating in full . It will not always be nor will it be explicit, but in some way Ferraté will want to know the tradition of homosexual literature, to make introspective use of it, but also to place himself in a critical position that would allow him to better understand poets like Luis Cernuda ( “I’m tired of being alive”) or Gil de Biedma (“Eran las noches incurables / y la calentura”). In a diary entry at the end of 1945, when he is recovering from tuberculosis, he mentions the help of the discovery of the character of Julien Sorel and notes that he has reread Montherlant’s Olympiques, a fascinating text about male beauty that in some edition included photographs of bare-chested athletes. He will read Gide (he will transcribe fragments in his diary) and he will study in depth Rimbaud (to whom he dedicated a monograph written in French).
When he resumed his studies in Barcelona in the 1946-1947 academic year, he began Philosophy and Letters in addition to Law. He befriends a fellow runner: Rudolf Grewe. It was while researching Grewe’s life that I met Ferraté. “He was my dearest friend”, he told me when he was leaving his house after interviewing him in Ferran Puig’s attic (the scene of a hilarious passage in El vientre de la ballena by his friend Javier Cercas ). In May 1947, following an anecdote that Grewe had told him, Ferraté wrote it in his diary: “Sometimes I fall into the fantasy of believing or wanting to believe that she is a pederast like me”. If Ferraté made the relationship with Daniel the moral center of his life, the old and deep hope was this.
During the 1947-1948 academic year, he reunited with his friend Alfonso Costafreda, who would soon become one of the most promising post-war poets with the book Nuestra elegía. They were friends, but neither was easy to deal with. One day Ferraté invites him to the room of the boarding house where he lives. They eat bread and ham, they don’t know much what to say to each other and Ferraté leaves him the diary notebooks. “When he saw pederasty, I saw myself too, with his eyes and mine filled with the memory of suffering, so inevitably grazed by pederasty… Like a gulp of tears, despair and resentment rose up in me of this unsatisfied love, almost suffocated already by force of inhibition”. Costafreda hugs him and Ferraté thinks that someone else already knows what he feels: “I’m dead”. But now that Costafreda knows and won’t abandon him, Ferraté feels revived. He even titles the essay he would like to write: Against fear or the reasons of the heart. But this effervescence, after a few days, fades away.
When the course ends, Ferraté begins correspondence with a friend he met at university: Josep Maria Castellet, who has a clinical eye. The first letters that Ferraté sent him have not been preserved, but Castellet transcribes a few words from Ferraté in the first. From the Picarany, with existentialist rhetoric, he has explained to him that he wallows “in restlessness and nausea”. Castellet reads it and revolts and admonishes him: he must “start – yes, don’t rush – to live. Not to think until after having met”. But the paradox of Ferraté, who often sees himself as dead, is that he believed he could not live because he could not know, and only through reading did he dare to live his subjectivity, living a vicarious life made entirely of thought .
Fully aware of who he was and what he felt, with his first essay about to go to press—Carles Riba today—, in the fall of 1954 Ferraté left to teach at the Universidad de Oriente, in Cuba. At the port, when he was embarking, Grewe gave him a book by Pindar. Grewe, homosexual like him, would also leave soon after to try to make a career away from the reclusive Francoist Spain. In Cuba he was a professor of classical languages, and this work would produce the volume Líricos griegos archaicos.
One of the first times that Ferraté returned to Barcelona, he resumed the conversation with Riba about Kavafis and started a friendship with two figures of the city’s literary life: the publisher Jaime Salinas, who was working on the modernization of the catalog of Seix Barral , and the poet Gil de Biedma. They were weeks of camaraderie, walks and confidences. All three were homosexuals. The first letter that Ferraté addresses to Jaime Gil, from Cuba, confesses the joy of friendship. “Today, from my house in Cuabitas, Santiago de Cuba (Cuba), I know that I love you much”
And at the beginning of 1962, after the expansive wave of the Cuban revolution put him in the pillory, he moved to cold Edmonton for work. At the end of that year, he suffered one of the episodes that would push his paranoid drive to the limit: Seix Barral published La operación de leer carelessly, and interpreted that malpractice —which he complained angrily to Salinas and Carles Barral—sabotaged the possibility of being recognized as a great essayist. In Edmonton he lives with Daphne Kempf, and with her he will have a daughter, Amàlia, born in June 1965. A year later Ferraté travels to Rome. There he writes the fervent diary of an obsessed: he lets his misogyny overflow, as his desire begins to overflow, on the border of amour fou, chasing dwarfs he sees in the street or infatuating himself with paintings where in the voice of portraits. It can be read in Del desig. There he explains that he buys postcards of paintings with children by Caravaggio, who in his time was accused of pederasty.
And on the night of January 12 to 13, 1970, Daniel. “Wretched by the shipwreck of love that I have been, all alone, enslaved to fear, while I have lived”, says a verse he writes and copies in his diary after a month and a half. The atavistic fear ends, the old and deep hope is fulfilled. “My longing for the almond-colored forehead is old.” Now, at the age of 45, he is resurrected. It had been more than twenty years since Castellet had told him that in order to think he had to know himself. Ferraté, who spent his life thinking about himself, will now be able to think definitively. This is the theme of the last diary of Desire, written between 1974 and 1975. “The purpose of my life has been, is, wisdom, full possession of myself.” What he had read in Salvatge cor, what he had experienced, was that the sexual relationship (“a great loss and a great empire”, Carner reveals) was a form of dispossession through the other that made it possible to know oneself deeply . “After all, we are nothing but our desire”.
The person who had best rationalized that experience was Paul Valéry from the Cahiers, “one of my closest doubles”. In the diary he transcribes two entries in French to portray himself, two quotations about desire that will later be the first engine of his original, fascinating and meticulous reading of The waste land: he elaborates it from “a certain conception of the ‘erotism, which helps me to explain the function that desire performs in Eliot’s poem’. At the same time, he systematically translated Kavafis, the version he would publish first in La Gaia Ciència and then in Quaderns Crema. And he begins to spend longer seasons in Barcelona. “I bought this apartment because of the boys I saw playing basketball, half-naked, in the school yard across the street.” He begins to plan the edition of his brother Gabriel’s work.
Ferraté is who he’s always been, and that’s how his friends see him; dealing with him is never easy. This is how Salinas mercilessly portrays him in a letter he sends to his partner. “Sad and senile voyeurism that underlines an unconfessed loneliness. I listened to him with the patience that Anafranil provokes in me, but with the displeasure that comes from seeing something unhealthy (not morally but physically): see premature, vicarious pleasures; smell of rancid semen”. Ferraté was like that, but in his memory he kept a pearl that justified his life. From there, despite the anguish, he had conquered self-esteem, which he would try to develop with the groups of young literati who approached him
Francesc Parcerisas recalled the informal lessons he gave in 1979 at the Velódromo. There were young people like Antoni Marí, Dolors Oller, Narcís Comadira, Félix de Azúa or Jaume Vallcorba, among others. The subject was the poetry of March, whose edition he had prepared. They read verse by verse. In his notes, Parcerisas recorded these sentences: “desire is the first thing that arises and gives strength to love. And then comes the delight, which holds love in its kingdom”; “the soul begins to see clearly when the body weakens”. A few years later, the group, also connected to the publishing house of Vallcorba, recycled itself: it was the moment that recreated Cercas in these same pages, the stage of the articles in Diari de Barcelona and the poetry courses in Cadaqués. There, Salvador Oliva explained to me, one day he commented on “Preservation” by Carner, and told the students who were listening that he was that poem. He could also be heard at the seminar on March that he gave at Bones Lletres, invited by Jordi Llovet.
When I treated him, around 1999, Joan Ferraté was a permanently alert man who always seemed alone. I remember him telling me that he would like to be buried with his edition of Carner’s March and Poetry. And in a way it was, as the faithful Jordi Cornudella explained in Les bones compañías. On top of a piece of furniture there was an open edition of Poetry with the poem ‘Cant de flabiol’ as a final farewell and a testament to life’s serenity. Ferraté had decided precisely to die that night. In 2003. Between January 12 and 13.
https://elpais.com/quadern/literatura/2024-09-22/joan-ferrate-els-nois-i-els-dies.html
El desig de Joan Ferraté
-> What did you feel the first time you saw him, walking by you on the right, leaving his tray on a table, shaking hands with José, being introduced as Sandra’s brother, sitting at the second table in front of you, chatting and munching? Curiosity. What did you do? I asked him to join us: without knowing it, I was helping Fate. Did you love him? He was lovely, indeed. But did you love him? I felt towards him a very warm sympathy. How do you know? I stayed, and did not want to leave. What was your talk about? His work, his leaving Calgary, philosophy, the general aim of life, his not worrying about anything. How did you dare to help Fate again? I don’t know: I just did it (perhaps Fate was helping me). What did you do when you got home? I tried to look relaxed and casual: I suggested a bath, I offered him food, I gave him a last drop of sherry.
Ahir, per exemple, Daniel va fer tard a la cita que teníem amb els Musacchio, i fins que no es va presentar la meva angúnia va anar creixent com si no pogués preveure cap altra explicació de la seva absència que la més dolorosa, que fóra el pur desdeny.
***
Dels teus setze anys el poc que tinc val més
que el que he perdut, que és passat i tot mort.
No penso pas incriminar la sort,
que t’emportà, si no et torna: només
fora del temps, dins el temps de després,
oh pur absent vogant pel meu record,
potser, a la fi, faràs rem cap al port
del meu destí; i, rescatat excés
miserable del naufragi d’amor
que he estat, jo sol, asservit a la por,
mentre he viscut, m’atorgaràs estranys
sous de delit pels treballs de dolor
del meu servei, i en pac del meu
enyor desesperat, l’amor dels teus setze anys.
Of your sixteen years, the little I have is worth more than what I have lost, which is past and all dead. I do not think to incriminate fate, which took you, if it does not return to you: only out of time, in the time after, oh pure absentee sailing for my memory, maybe, in the end, you will row to the port of my destiny ; and, rescued too wretched from the shipwreck of love that I have been, alone, enslaved to fear, while I have lived, you will grant me strange wages of delight for the painful labors of my service, and in peace for my desperate longing, love of your sixteen years.
https://alteritas.net/pastis/making-nothing-happen-2/
Dels teus setze anys no tinc res, i en tinc més que no he perdut. Ara, a frec de la mort, no penso pas incriminar la sort, que t’emportà, si no et torna: només fora del temps, dins el temps de després, vogant perdut pel mar del meu record, potser, a la fi, faràs rem cap al port del meu destí. I, rescatat excés miserable del naufragi d’amor que he estat tot jo, sol amb la meva por, mentre he viscut, em donaràs estranys
Mor la poeta Jill Jarrell, l’esposa de Gabriel Ferrater
Mor la poeta Jill Jarrell, l’esposa de Gabriel Ferrater
Es descobreix el misteri de Gabriel Ferrater
Metrònom Ferrater
