PERE QUART & CLAIRE FONTAINE: METRICS AND WORDS

Joan Oliver / Pere Quart

Claire Fontaine is a great follower of Pere Quart, one of the most important Catalan writers of the 20th century. She wants to talk about the poet and about metrics in poetry which are so important as metrics in internet.

Joan Oliver i Sallarès, who used as a poetry-writer the pseudonym Pere Quart, (1899-1986) is considered one of the most important writers in Catalonia, specially because of his rebelliousness and social commitment.

He was born in 1899, the member of an outstanding family of the industrial bourgeoisie of Sabadell. He was the fourth of eleven brothers; he was the only survivor. He took the pseudonym with which he would sign his poetic work: Pere Quart. He studied Law. In year 1919, he formed the Group of Sabadell with the novelist Francesc Trabal and the poet Armand Obiols. In this group the influence of vanguardism was combined with local humor.

More information: Joan Oliver (Catalan Version)

During the Civil War he engaged politically with the republican side. He was nominated president of the Association of Catalan Writers and leader of Generalitat's Ministry of Culture publications. Moreover he was co-founder and headleader of Institution of the Catalan Letters publications, and author of the Catalan popular army hymn's letter. All this means a definite break with his bourgeois past and the birth of a strong political, ethical and social commitment. 

In this context he created Oda a Barcelona and the play La fam. At the end of the war, the Republican Generalitat will order him the task of evacuating all the intellectuals. Finished the war will exile first in France, embark towards Buenos Aires and establish definitively in Santiago of Chile, where he will live for eight years. During the exile, he continued his task of intellectual compromised with his time and his country. He collaborated with Catalonia, edited in Buenos Aires, and directed Germanor, edited in Chile. He set up the collection The pine of the three branches along Xavier Benguerel.

More information: Lletra UOC (Catalan Version)

In 1948 Joan Oliver came back to Barcelona, where Franco's dictatorship was characterized by authoritarianism and repression. He was imprisoned for three months in the Model prison of Barcelona. Three years later he received the Prize of the French Republic President in the floral games of Paris, for the translation into Catalan of The Misanthrope by Molière. He translated and adapted works of several authors like Anton Chekhov. 

Pere Quart / Joan Oliver

In 1960 his more emblematic work appeared: Vacances Pagades. It is a skeptical work, sarcastic too, where a great appointment with the social and political reality of the country is shown. Oliver makes an acid crictisim to the capitalism, the consumer society and the Franco dictatorship. 

With the death of the dictator and democracy entry, he was especially displeased with the dominant politicians, denouncing the betrayal that meant the transition. In year 1982 he rejected the Cross of Saint George. He became an uncomfortable character for the politicians, who was necessary to corner. 

Nothing of all this, however, prevented him from being considered one of the five best Catalan poets of the 20th century. In 1986 he died in Barcelona and was buried in his natal city, Sabadell.

The metric is a necessary and fundamental work in any web analytics. The web allows us to measure metrics that can extract data from a webpage. Choose the parameters studied, read and analyze them carefully allow us to improve the performance of this.

Pere Quart composed couplets, sonnets, glosses, rooms and songs while respecting the standards set for metric creation -number of syllables and rhyme- and web analysts today, analyze visits -exclusive or recurring-, the length of connecting users or bounce rates and conversion. Pere Quart wanted to transmit feelings through poems. Analysts studying how to make certain information available to the largest number of people possible. 

More information: Forbes 

Avui en terres de França
i demà més lluny potser,
no em moriré d'enyorança
ans d'enyorança viuré.

Today in French lands

tomorrow further perhaps,

I won't die by yearning

because I live of yearning. 

Pere Quart

SEPTEMBER 25, 1962: THE BIG TRAGEDY UNDER THE MUD

It was a normal day until the sky became dark and a terrible storm changed our lives forever. We mustn't forget that. - Joseph de Ca'th Lon.
 

Terrassa - September, 26th 1962

September, 25 1962

I was a child. We were visiting my grandparents in Terrassa. 

I remember Terrassa like an industrial city plenty of chimneys and factories. The sky was always grey; the workers wore grey clothes; the buildings were grey; life was grey in an important city that was living under a military dictatorship. 

It wasn't easy to visit my family but thanks to our Swiss nationality, nobody could forbid us to do it. My grandparents lived in the centre of the city, near the City Hall Square. Terrassa was one of the most important industrial cities of the state and lots of people lived in the city, the most part of them near the streams in poor huts made of wood and mud.

The previous day, we had visited Barcelona, the capital. Barcelona celebrated its big party and my grandparents thought that it could be interesting for me to enjoy it. Barcelona was a big city, bigger than Terrassa, the biggest city but the feeling was the same: grey people living grey lives and suffering an endless dictatorship.

I didn't understand why my grandparents didn't want to live with us in Geneva where life was plenty of colours and freedom but they had their lives in this city.

It was a typical day of autumn and we went to sleep after having dinner. Suddenly, a light across the window was the first signal. It started to rain. At the beginning, it seemed a normal storm but it wasn't. Hundreds of litres falling over the city and the disasters were tremendous.

More than one thousand people died because of the overflowing. The most important river in the area the Besòs and lots of streams overflowed.

Terrassa, Sabadell, Rubí, Sant Quirze del Vallès, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Ripollet, Mollet del Vallès, Castellar del Vallès, Montcada... 

Terrassa - September, 26th 1962

These cities were desolated by the force of the flood; thousands of people died and thousands and thousands of people lost their homes.

Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Antoni Tàpies, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Antoni Clavé, Modest Cuixart, Antoni Cumella and Joan-Josep Tharrats donated their works to an auction. They offered 204 works.

The political situation in 1962 and a nonexistent urban planning were the responsible of that disaster. Nobody paid enough attention about this catastrophe in the high spheres because nine years later, in September 20, 1971, it happened the same, this time with the Llobregat river and with the population of El Baix Llobregat, especially in the cities of Martorell, Sant Boi and Cornellà de Llobregat.

Almost a thousand people died, in a tragedy that someone could have avoided. Nobody did nothing and the tragedy repeated again.

In memoriam.

More information: Flood in the Vallès, 1962

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. 

Karl Marx