From Catalan Poetry to Fortuny Gowns

P ere Gimferrer i Torrens is a poet, novelist, translator, and critic with some fifty books to his name. Despite countless awards and the praise of such writers as Roberto Bolaño, Octavio Paz, and Juan Goytisolo, his work was largely unknown in English when I translated his long poetry cycle Alma Venus in 2014. Shortly afterward , I began work on his novel Fortuny, an elegy for the Belle Époque in extremely lush, poetic prose, released by David R. Godine in February 2016. This past December, I arranged to meet Gimferrer in his office at the publisher Seix Barral, where he works as editorial director. The space is a bit less frightfully disordered than in the photos I had seen of it before: apparently the thousands of books piled on the desk, floor, and shelves were recently deemed a hazard, and workers have since cleared them out. Adrian Nathan West: You published your first book, Mensaje del tetrarca, fifty-two years ago— Pere Gimferrer: True, but that’s a rather juvenile and not very representative book . . . ANW: In any case, you’ve enjoyed unquestioned renown in Spain in the years since. You’ve won many prizes, you’re a member of the Spanish and Catalan language academies, and Harold Bloom included your work in the list of Spanish authors essential to the Western canon. Nonetheless , your poetry was only translated into English in 2014. How would you describe your trajectory to a reader unfamiliar with your work? PG: I’ve written in four languages, though mainly in Spanish and Catalan. One book in Italian and a chapbook in French. My own work arises as an attempt to expand upon the poetry that existed in the West in the 1930s, the course of which was disrupted by World War II and the Spanish Civil War. War left its traces on poets the world over, from Cummings to Auden to Eliot, and obviously throughout Europe and Latin America, but the effects in these countries can’t be compared to the abrupt break that took place in Spain, where because of the civil war, the normal aesthetic evolution was abandoned and the poetry that should have been written in ’36 or ’39 was lost. There was a step backward, aesthetically and morally , and neither the poets who stayed nor those who went into exile followed the path they would naturally have taken. I wanted to write as though the civil war hadn’t left this imprint on literature. ANW: How would you describe the form and genesis of Fortuny? Q&A From Catalan Poetry to Fortuny Gowns A Conversation with Pere Gimferrer by Adrian Nathan West Spain’s most acclaimed living poet, Pere Gimferrer is the author of more than thirty volumes of verse, essays, criticism, and fiction in Spanish and Catalan as well as a recent book in Italian, Per Riguardo. His novel Fortuny has recently been published in English by David R. Godine. 10 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 11 photo : mary evans / oscar elias / iberfoto PG: The story behind it is very simple: in the year 1980–something, I had a date at the Fortuny Museum, which was abandoned at the time—not completely, but still in quite precarious conditions. With the notes I took in Venice and those I made on my return, I sketched out an extensive outline for the novel. Not long afterward, just before beginning the first page, I thought: why draw this out into the form of a story? So Fortuny is an amplification of a novel that I conceived but didn’t care to write, because I thought this kind of skeletal form suited it better. ANW: It’s an interesting book because it has an immense cast of characters, but all of them are, in a way, like ghosts . . . PG: Well, everything I write there is or could be true, except that almost no one ever speaks. I think it just happens once in the book. That relates to ideas I had then about changing the narrative genre. ANW: The characters and settings are classical but at the same time, the approach is cinematic , reminiscent of the nouveau roman. PG: It’s true, there

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