Like the cross-bowman,
the gambler in the song,
the Iberian had an arrow for his god
when he shattered the grain with hail
and ruined the fruits of autumn;
and a gloria when he fattened
the barley and the oats
that were to make bread to-morrow.
"God of ruin,
I worship because I wait and because I fear.
I bend in prayer to the earth
a blasphemous heart.
"Lord, through whom I snatch my bread with pain,
I know your strength, I know my slavery.
Lord of the clouds in the east
that trample the country-side,
of dry autumns and late frosts
and of the blasts of heat that scorch the harvests!
"Lord of the iris in the green meadows
where the sheep graze,
Lord of the fruit the worms gnaw
and of the hut the whirlwind shatters,
your breath gives life to the fire in the hearth,
your warmth ripens the tawny grain,
and your holy hand, St. John's eve,
hardens the stone of the green olive.
"Lord of riches and poverty,
Of fortune and mishap,
who gives to the rich luck and idleness,
and pain and hope to the poor!
"Lord, Lord, in the inconstant wheel
of the year I have sown my sowing
that has an equal chance with the coins
of a gambler sown on the gambling-table!
"Lord, a father to-day, though stained with yesterday's blood,
two-faced of love and vengeance,
to you, dice cast into the wind,
goes my prayer, blasphemy and praise!"
This man who insults God in his altars,
without more care of the frown of fate,
also dreamed of paths across the seas
and said: "It is God who walks upon the waters."
Is it not he who put God above war,
beyond fate,
beyond the earth,
beyond the sea and death?
Did he not give the greenest bough
of the dark-green Iberian oak
for God's holy bonfire,
and for love flame one with God?
But to-day ... What does a day matter?
for the new household gods
there are plains in forest shade
and green boughs in the old oak-woods.
Though long the land waits
for the curved plough to open the first furrow,
there is sowing for God's grain
under thistles and burdocks and nettles.
What does a day matter? Yesterday waits
for to-morrow, to-morrow for infinity;
men of Spain, neither is the past dead,
nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written.
Who has seen the face of the Iberian God?
I wait
for the Iberian man who with strong hands
will carve out of Castilian oak
The parched God of the grey land.
_XII: A Catalan Poet_
_It is time for sailing; the swallow has come chattering and the
mellow west wind; the meadows are already in bloom; the sea is
silent and the waves the rough winds pummeled. Up anchors and loose
the hawsers, sailor, set every stitch of canvas. This I, Priapos
the harbor god, command you, man, that you may sail for all manner
of ladings._ (_Leonidas in the Greek Anthology._)
Catalonia like Greece is a country of mountains and harbors, where the
farmers and herdsmen of the hills can hear in the morning the creak of
oars and the crackling of cordage as the great booms of the wing-shaped
sails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts of the fishermen's
boats. Barcelona with its fine harbor nestling under the towering
slopes of Montjuic has been a trading city since most ancient times. In
the middle ages the fleets of its stocky merchants were the economic
scaffolding which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the great sea
kingdom of the Aragonese. To this day you can find on old buildings the
arms of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in Mallorca and
Manorca and Ibiza and Sardinia and Sicily and Naples. It follows that
when Catalonia begins to reemerge as a nucleus of national
consciousness after nearly four centuries of subjection to Castile,
poets speaking Catalan, writing Catalan, shall be poets of the
mountains and of the sea.
Yet this time the motor force is not the sailing of white argosies
towards the east. It is textile mills, stable, motionless, drawing
about them muddled populations, raw towns, fattening to new arrogance
the descendants of those stubborn burghers who gave the kings of Aragon
and of Castile such vexing moments. (There's a story of one king who
was so chagrined by the tight-pursed contrariness of the Cortes of
Barcelona that he died of a broken heart in full parliament assembled.)
This growth of industry during the last century, coupled with the
reawakening of the whole Mediterranean, took form politically in the
Catalan movement for secession from Spain, and in literature in the
resurrection of Catalan thought and Catalan language.
Naturally the first generation was not interested in the manufactures
that were the dynamo that generated the ferment of their lives. They
had first to state the emotions of the mountains and the sea and of
ancient heroic stories that had been bottled up in their race during
centuries of inexpressiveness. For another generation perhaps the
symbols will be the cluck of oiled cogs, the whirring of looms, the
dragon forms of smoke spewed out of tall chimneys, and the substance
will be the painful struggle for freedom, for sunnier, richer life of
the huddled mobs of the slaves of the machines. For the first men
conscious of their status as Catalans the striving was to make
permanent their individual lives in terms of political liberty, of the
mist-capped mountains and the changing sea.
Of this first generation was Juan Maragall who died in 1912, five years
after the shooting of Ferrer, after a life spent almost entirely in
Barcelona writing for newspapers,--as far as one can gather, a
completely peaceful well-married existence, punctuated by a certain
amount of political agitation in the cause of the independence of
Catalonia, the life of a placid and recognized literary figure; "_un
maitre_" the French would have called him.
Perhaps six centuries before, in Palma de Mallorca, a young nobleman, a
poet, a skilled player on the lute had stood tiptoe for attainment
before the high-born and very stately lady he had courted through many
moonlight nights, when her eye had chilled his quivering love suddenly
and she had pulled open her bodice with both hands and shown him her
breasts, one white and firm and the other swollen black and purple with
cancer. The horror of the sight of such beauty rotting away before his
eyes had turned all his passion inward and would have made him a saint
had his ideas been more orthodox; as it was the Blessed Ramon Lull
lived to write many mystical works in Catalan and Latin, in which he
sought the love of God in the love of Earth after the manner of the
sufi of Persia. Eventually he attained bloody martyrdom arguing with
the sages in some North African town. Somehow the spirit of the
tortured thirteenth-century mystic was born again in the calm Barcelona
journalist, whose life was untroubled by the impact of events as could
only be a life comprising the last half of the nineteenth century. In
Maragall's writings modulated in the lovely homely language of the
peasants and fishermen of Catalonia, there flames again the passionate
metaphor of Lull.
Here is a rough translation of one of his best known poems:
At sunset time
drinking at the spring's edge
I drank down the secrets
of mysterious earth.
Deep in the runnel
I saw the stainless water
born out of darkness
for the delight of my mouth,
and it poured into my throat
and with its clear spurting
there filled me entirely
mellowness of wisdom.
When I stood straight and looked,
mountains and woods and meadows
seemed to me otherwise,
everything altered.
Above the great sunset
there already shone through the glowing
carmine contours of the clouds
the white sliver of the new moon.
It was a world in flower
and the soul of it was I.
I the fragrant soul of the meadows
that expands at flower-time and reaping-time.
I the peaceful soul of the herds
that tinkle half-hidden by the tall grass.
I the soul of the forest that sways in waves
like the sea, and has as far horizons.
And also I was the soul of the willow tree
that gives every spring its shade.
I the sheer soul of the cliffs
where the mist creeps up and scatters.
And the unquiet soul of the stream
that shrieks in shining waterfalls.
I was the blue soul of the pond
that looks with strange eyes on the wanderer.
I the soul of the all-moving wind
and the humble soul of opening flowers.