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| Joseph & The Grandma waiting for Jordi, Palafrugell |
Today, Joseph de Ca'th Lon and The Grandma have arrived to Palafrugell, birthplace of Josep Pla, one of the greatest writers in Catalan language. Joseph and The Grandma have been waiting for the arrival of Jordi Santanyí, their closer friend and a great expert, as a writer he is, in Literature in general and in Josep Pla in particular.
The Grandma likes Pla's works especially Contraban i altres narracions, Smuggling and other stories, a novel about the life of fishermen in the Costa Brava during the Post Spanish Civil War.
The three friends have started a visit across Palafrugell and other beautiful places of the Costa Brava, a wonderful and amazing coast that you must visit, at least, once in your life although you never have enough time to discover every little place of this enchanting land.
During a week, they are going to walk across the coast discovering unforgettable places and the most important, knowing the local culture and meeting with native people, the most valuable treasure of this awesome travel.
Meanwhile Josep and The Grandma were waiting for Jordi, she has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.
Chapter 14. Schemes and views (III) (Spanish Version)
Palafrugell is a municipality in the Mediterranean Costa Brava, located near Palamós in the comarca of Baix Empordà, in the province of Girona, Catalonia. With 22,365 inhabitants it is the largest city of its comarca. Several coastal and interior towns (Llafranc, Calella de Palafrugell, Tamariu and Llofriu) belong to this city.
The combination of a good summer climate and beautiful beaches has been exploited for both domestic and international tourism. Tourists have come from a wide range of countries, especially the Netherlands, England, France, and more recently, the United States. It also serves as a summer holiday town for residents of cities such as Barcelona and Girona.
This medieval town was once fortified but is no longer. Many narrow streets emanate from Plaça Nova -a large square with bars, restaurants and boutiques. The local government -Ajuntament- sponsors activities such as concerts and dances including the traditional Sardana. St. Martí's church was built in the late 11th century and is close to Plaça Nova.
Palafrugell was reputed for its cork manufacturing in the 18th and 19th centuries. The largest factory was owned by the American company Armstrong and employed hundreds of locals. Its closing in the 1970s led to severe unemployment. The factory's tower still stands, and there is now a small museum commemorating the cork industry just below it.
More information: Visit Palafrugell
Josep Pla i Casadevall (8 March 1897, Palafrugell, Girona-23 April 1981, Llofriu, Girona) was a Catalan journalist and a popular author. As a journalist he worked in France, Italy, England, Germany and Russia, from where he wrote political and cultural chronicles in Catalan.
The son of rural business owners of modest means from Baix Empordà, he obtained his high school diploma in Girona, where, beginning in 1909, he was a boarding student at the Col·legi dels Maristes.
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| Josep Pla i Casadevall |
In his last academic year (1912–13), he had to take his final exams without having taken the courses because he was expelled from the boarding school. In 1913 he registered to study science at the University of Barcelona and began his studies in medicine, but in the middle of his first course, he changed his mind and registered to study law.
The emptiness that he felt in his life at the university did not prevent him from involving himself in another environment that would focus the intellectual disorientation of his youth -the Barcelona Ateneu Club, with its library and above all the daily tertúlia (discussion group) led by Dr. Joaquim Borralleras and attended by celebrities such as Josep Maria de Sagarra, Eugeni d'Ors and Francesc Pujols.
His admiration for Pío Baroja came from this period -a constant reference for his generation- as well as the influence of Alexandre Plana, a childhood friend and teacher, whom he credits with his decision to distance himself from the pretentious style of the 19th century and to support a literature for the whole world based on intelligibility, clarity, and simplicity, ideas which would be constant features through his literary career.
In 1919 he graduated with a degree in Law and began to work in journalism, first in Las Noticias and soon after in night publication of La Publicidad. He started his journey as a correspondent in various European cities (Paris, Madrid, Berlin).
More information: Fundació Josep Pla
A modern Catalan nationalist, in 1921 he was elected as a Member of Parliament of the Commonwealth of Catalonia by the Lliga Regionalista (Regionalist League) in his native region, Baix Empordà. En 1924, under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, he underwent a military proceeding and was condemned to exile because of a critical article about the Spanish military policy in Morocco, published in Majorca's El Día.
During the years of his exile, he negotiated with some of the principal Catalan opponents of the dictatorship such as Francesc Macià. He continued travelling though Europe (Paris, Russia, England), and in 1925 he published his first book, Coses Vistes, which was a great success and sold out in a week. It was a good preview of his aesthetic: to write about the things which one has seen.
In 1927 he returned to Catalonia, left La Publicidad and began to collaborate with La Veu de Catalunya, the Lliga Regionalista's newspaper, of a liberal-conservative tendency, to the orders of Francesc Cambó –leader of moderate Catalan nationalism, whose famous tertulias he attended regularly.
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| Josep Pla i Casadevall |
In April 1931, on the same morning of the proclamation of the Republic of Spain, he was invited to Madrid by Cambó as parliamentary correspondent of La Veu and became a witness to the first days of the Republic. Madrid's book of the notable events of these months, of great historic value is El advenimiento de la República, The coming of the Republic.
He remained in Madrid during nearly all of the Republican period, writing features about Parliament, which allowed him to mix with the Spanish political and cultural elite. Pla, who was neither an anti-republican nor an anti-monarchist but a pragmatist who wanted to see a modernization of the State, at first expressed a certain sympathy for the Republic. He believed that the new political system could get off the ground in Spain if it consolidated itself according to the French Republican model, even though little by little he was becoming disillusioned with the course of events until he eventually considered it a frantic and destructive madness.
Claiming health reasons, he abandoned an agitated and dangerous Madrid a few months before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Not even Barcelona seemed safe to him, and he fled in a boat from Catalonia towards Marseille, in September 1938, in the company of Adi Enberg, a Norwegian citizen born in Barcelona who worked for the Francoist espionage service. She was the only person from his secretive and often meagre romantic life with whom we can be certain that he was involved.
He continued his exile in Rome, where he wrote a good part of the immense Historia de la Segunda República Española, History of the Second Spanish Republic, an assignment for Francesc Cambó –one of the financiers of the military uprising, which Pla would refuse to re-publish during his lifetime, despite its being a historical work of great interest.
More information: Ruta Josep Pla
In the autumn of 1938, Enberg and Pla traveled to Biarritz and from there they managed to reach San Sebastián, where they entered the Francoist controlled portion of Spain.
In January 1939 he, Manuel Aznar and other journalists entered Barcelona along with the victorious Francoist troops. Between February and April 1939, when the war ended, he became the assistant manager of the newspaper La Vanguardia under the direction of Aznar. Overwhelmed by the course of events of the immediate post-war period and before the unexpected failure of his project at La Vanguardia, he moved to the Empordà (Girona) and separated from Adi Enberg.
In September 1939 he published his first article in Destino, the weekly publication that his Catalan friends created in Burgos and for which he started to write weekly a few months later, from February 1940. These are the years he spent travelling around his native region, discovering its landscapes and people, small towns and, of course, the sea. Also he finally accepted his role of lower rural bourgeois and never again lived in Barcelona.
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| Josep Pla visits BBC, London |
Due to his regular work with Destino, although he was no longer one of its principal driving forces, he returned to travelling the world, not as a correspondent, but as a journalistic observer, which allowed him to write magnificent travel reports: he visited France, Israel, Cuba, New York, the Middle East, South America, and Russia.
Regarding Israel, for instance, he left a unique testimony of its first years of existence as a State -he visited it in 1957, arriving in Tel Aviv in a boat from Marseille full of displaced Jews. He arrived during the enthusiastic construction of the cities and Hebrew infrastructures in the middle of the desert. As a curiosity, Pla had a fondness for travels in very slow oil tankers, which allowed him to write his works peacefully and without distractions from contact with tourists.
In the 1970s Pla dedicated himself fully to the preparation of his complete works, a crucial stage since it involved an almost total re-writing of his work and the development of his own unique style. In order to publish these works, he counted on invaluable support of his fellow countryman Josep Vergés, editor of Destino. Meanwhile, culture in the Catalan language was reappearing little by little.
After Francoism was terminated by the Spanish Constitution of 1978, despite already being the most-read writer in the Catalan language, fellow authors in Catalan -overwhelmingly on the Left- did not forgive him for his past support of the Francoists during the Civil War and his later coexistence with the régime -Pla had counted on a peaceful and ordered evolution towards democracy. He was also criticized by fellow Catalan authors because of his disdain for fiction as a literary form.
More information: Fem Turisme
He proved himself equally distant: his often sarcastic criticism of some Catalan political and cultural figures had the result, similar to the case of the artist Salvador Dalí, that Catalan culture denied him recognition in the form of prizes -the refusal to grant him the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres. They alienated him from his magazine for life, and they did not recognize his extraordinary worth until many years later.
Even so, in 1980, near the end of his life, Josep Tarradellas gave him the Medalla d'Or de la Generalitat de Catalunya, The Gold Medal of the Government of Catalonia. It is worth mentioning, as it represented a minor fissure within the so-far monolithic rejection of Pla by writers in Catalan, that Joan Coromines, a fundamental Catalan etymologist, supported Pla in his own acceptance speech for the gold medal Coromines was also granted.
Pla died in 1981 in his native Empordà, leaving thirty-eight volumes, -over twenty-five thousand pages- of Complete Works published, and many unedited papers that have been published since his death.
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| Josep Pla i Casadevall |
Pla had to live under censorship for much of his life: first during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, later in Italy and Germany, where he worked as a correspondent during the rise of the Falange, and during Francisco Franco's long rule.
Although he initially sympathized with the dictatorship, he wrote in 1940 that it was in the general interest, his support only lasted a few months. He soon began to show skepticism, especially as it became impossible to publish in Catalan.
Although he always maintained a moderate political stance that allowed him to publish, he was deeply uncomfortable with Franco's tireless censorship -he wrote in one of his diaries that it was the worst that [I] have known, carried out by servants of fanaticism. He hated the regime's disdain for Catalan language and culture and its stubborn inability to turn itself into a democracy, not even a tutelary one.
More information: Institut Ramon Llull
The most important characteristics of the Planian literary style are simplicity, irony, and clarity. Extremely modest and sensitive to ridicule, he detested artifice and empty rhetoric. Throughout his literary life, he remained faithful to his own style: the necessity of a clear, precise, and restrained writing and his lack of interest in literary fiction, cultivating a dry style, apparently simple, practical, and devoted to that which is real. He was an acute observer of reality in its smallest details and he gave a faithful testimony of the society of his time.
His works show a subjective and colloquial vision, anti-literary, in which he stresses, nevertheless, an enormous stylistic effort by calling things by their names and coming up with the precise adjective, one of his most persistent literary obsessions.
An untiring writer, from his viewpoint life is chaotic, irrational, and unjust, while the longing for equality and revolutions are a delusion that incites worse wrongs than those that it tries to put a stop to.
Conservative and rational, he was not inclined to action, but voluptuousness
and sensuality: the pleasure of putting the world down on paper. A good
conservative, he ate well and drank better -as an old man, whisky made
up a good part of his diet-, an inveterate smoker, he wore a bowler hat
from his youth and later was inseparable from his country beret.
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| Jordi & The Grandma talk about Josep Pla, Palafrugell |
He hated banality, cultural affectations -he never included quotations in his works, despite being a reader of the classics- and people who talk just to hear themselves. So he wrote: It is more difficult to write than to think, much more difficult: so everyone thinks.
Pla lived a life completely dedicated to writing. The extent of his Obres Completes (Complete Works, 46 volumes and nearly 30,000 pages), which is a collection of all his journals, reports, articles, essays, biographies, novels, and some poems gives an idea of its daunting work schedule while complicating its chronological classification. Many of these pages are the fruit of a hard process of rewriting texts from his youth and weekly articles that were published in Destino for nearly 40 years, as well as hundreds of articles published in different newspapers and an abundance of correspondences.
Thematic classification is not easy either, as many articles appeared in different locations with some changes, his thematic repertoire is extensive and, above all, the boundaries between the genres that he developed are not always clear.
During the first years of the Francoist regime, due of the complete restriction of the Catalan edition, the following works were published in Spanish: Guía de la Costa Brava (1941), Las ciudades del mar (1942), Viaje en autobús (1942) -considered one of his greatest works, and which proves his skillful grasp of the Spanish language-, Rusiñol y su tiempo (1942), El pintor Joaquín Mir (1944), Un señor de Barcelona (1945) and La huida del tiempo (1945).
In 1947, as soon as censorship was lifted, he returned to publishing in Catalan (Cadaqués, one of his most successful books).
More information: Visat
After 1956 he started the first series of his Complete Works, which extended to 29 volumes and in which he began to publish his extraordinary portrayals Homenots, Great men.
In 1966, Ediciones Destino began the publication of this series. The first volume was an unpublished work, El quadern gris, a book of notable events initially written when he was only a little over 20 years of age -although rewritten and substantially expanded later. It was translated into Spanish as El cuaderno gris by Dionisio Ridruejo and into English as The Gray Notebook by Peter Bush. It was considered a before and after in the public consideration of Pla, much more than as a journalist, as the best narrator of contemporary Catalan literature.
The success of the criticism and publicity of this work convinced Vergés to continue publishing the complete work, which has reached volume XLVI, with unpublished manuscripts, such as his Notas para un diario, written in the mid-1960s, not free from controversy, by the supposed amendments and manipulations to which Vergés himself was subjected -apparently, in order to suppress certain obscene passages.
His liberal-conservative thought, skeptical and uncompromising, filled with irony and common sense, still resounds today, even though it seems to contradict the current cultural establishment the same as it did the previous establishment.
His books remain in print, and both Spanish and Catalan critics have unanimously recognized him as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
Since 1968, the Josep Pla Award has been given in his honor, for works written and published in Catalan.
More information: The New Barcelona Post
No, do not take away books from me,
to see the sky, and to talk to people.
Josep Pla
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