Mercè Rodoreda
Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí was a Catalan novelist, who wrote in Catalan language.
She is considered the most influential contemporary Catalan language writer, as evidenced by the references of other authors to her work and the international repercussion, with translations into more than thirty languages.
She also has been called the most important Catalan female novelist of the postwar period. Her novel La plaça del diamant has become the most popular Catalan novel to date and has been translated into over 30 languages. Some critics consider it to be one of the best novels published in Spain after the Spanish Civil War.
After her death, one more of her artistic aspects was discovered, painting, which had remained in the background due to the importance that Rodoreda gave to writing:
Biography
Childhood (1908-1921)
Mercè Rosa Rodoreda i Gurguí was born on October 10, 1908, at 340 carrer de Balmes, Barcelona Her parents were Andreu Rodoreda, from Terrassa and Montserrat Gurguí, from Maresme. Both were lovers of literature and theater and had attended recital classes taught by Adrià Gual at the School of Dramatic Art. Her mother also had an interest in music.Her parents' financial problems forced her to leave school at age nine, from 1915 to 1917 at the Lurdes School in the Sarrià neighborhood and from 1917 to 1920 at the Nuestra Señora de Lourdes center, which was closest to her home, on Calle de Padua, at the height of the street of Vallirana. Later she went to an academy where she studied only French and business arithmetic.
Her maternal grandfather, Pere Gurguí, was an admirer of Jacint Verdaguer and had collaborated as an editor in the magazines La Renaixensa and L'Arc de Sant Martí. In 1910, Pere Gurguí had a monument in memory of Jacint Verdaguer erected in the garden of his house that bore an engraving with the title of the two most important works of the author, Canigó and L'Atlàntida; that place became the space for parties and family gatherings. The figure of her grandfather marked her intensely and she came to consider him her teacher. Gurguí instilled in her a deep Catalan feeling, and a love for the Catalan language and flowers that were well reflected throughout Mercè Rodoreda's work.
On May 18, 1913, when she was only five years old, she performed for the first time in a play playing the role of the girl Kitty in The Mysterious Jimmy Samson, at the Torrent de les Flors theater. Years later, this character was, in a certain way, recovered for the story The bathroom, within the work Twenty-two stories.
During her childhood she read all the classic and modern Catalan authors, such as Jacint Verdaguer, Ramon Llull, Joan Maragall, Josep Maria de Sagarra and Josep Carner, among others, surely influenced by the bohemian atmosphere that was breathed in her family's home.
On May 30, 1920, she participated in the drama Fifteen Days of Reign at Lourdes School. In the same act she also read the poem in Catalan called La negra.
In 1921, her uncle Juan moved in with the family and changed the lifestyle of all its members, imposing austerity and conventional order. She had idealized him as a result of the letters she had previously received and ended up marrying him on October 10, 1928, her twentieth birthday, in the church of Bonanova. He was fourteen years older than her and, due to the degree of consanguinity, they needed a papal dispensation.
Youth (1921-1938)
After the wedding, the couple went to Paris on a honeymoon, and then they settled in a house on Zaragoza Street. Her husband had gone to Argentina when he was very young and had returned with a small fortune.On July 23, 1929, their only son, Jordi Gurguí i Rodoreda, was born. From that moment on, Mercè Rodoreda began to do literary tests, to get rid of the economic and social dependency that the monotonous married life gave her. That is how she began to consider writing as a profession. Every day she locked herself for a while in a blue dovecote that was in Manuel Angelon's maternal house, which possibly later served as an inspiration to include the dovecote in The Time of the Doves. During that time, she wrote verses, a theatrical comedy, and a novel. Meanwhile, the Second Republic was proclaimed.
Second Spanish Republic
In 1931 she began to take classes at the Dalmau Lyceum, where she improved her knowledge of language under the guidance of the pedagogue, linguist and esperantist Delfí Dalmau i Enero, who greatly influenced her and encouraged her to train, and with whom a bond of friendship developed. Rodoreda showed Dalmau what she wrote and he encouraged her to make these first texts public. According to Dalmau, Mercè Rodoreda was an exceptional student, possessing spiritual fulfillment and a promising literary soul. This admiration led Dalmau to ask her to be one of the counterparts in her work Polémica, An Apology for Catalan and Esperanto; she answered affirmatively and the piece was published in 1934. As the teacher Dalmau recognized, this work had also been influenced by Rodoreda's observations.In 1932, the first novel by Mercè Rodoreda entitled Am I an honored woman? and also some stories for various newspapers. The work went almost unnoticed until it was nominated for the Crexells Prize in 1933, although the winner of that year was Carles Soldevila. Also in that year of 1932, on October 20, she published an interview with the actress Maria Vila in the Mirador magazine.
On October 1, 1933, she began her journalistic career in the weekly magazine Clarisme where she published twenty-two contributions: five prose on traditional culture, thirteen interviews, two reviews, a short story, and three comments on political, musical and film themes. That same year, she joined the Barcelona Press Association, which evidenced her intention to formalize collaboration with journalistic work.
In the spring of 1934 she published her second work, What cannot be escaped, in the editions of the magazine Clarisme. In May of that same year, she won the Independent Casino Award of the Floral Games of Lleida with the story "The little mermaid and the dolphin", which is currently lost.
After writing that second work, Joan Puig i Ferrater, director of Ediciones Proa, visited her and was interested in publishing her next work: A day in the life of a man, which was published in the autumn of that same year in Proa. Rodoreda began to enter the literary world thanks to the help of Puig i Ferrater himself, who opened the doors of El Club de los Novelistas, made up of authors such as Armand Obiols, Francesc Trabal or Joan Oliver, who were also former members of The Sabadell Group. At that time, she began to read the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
From 1935 to 1939, she published a total of sixteen stories for children in the newspaper La Publicidad, in a section called A while with children. Noteworthy is The Boy and The House, dedicated to her son, and also The Sheet, which she dedicated to Josep Carner. In addition, she combined it with the publication of stories in the leading Catalan press media such as La Revista, La Veu de Catalunya and Mirador, among others.
In 1936 she published her fourth novel, Crim. Later, Rodoreda rejected this novel, along with the previous three, considering them the product of inexperience.
Spanish Civil War
From 1937 until that moment, Rodoreda held the position of Catalan language corrector in the Generalitat's Propaganda Commissariat. In this place she met writers of that time such as Aurora Bertrana, Maria Teresa Vernet, and also established a friendship with Susina Amat, Julieta Franquesa, Anna Murià and Carmen Manrubia.She was awarded the 1937 Joan Crexells Prize for her work Aloma. That same year, she separated from her husband Joan Gurguí, after nine years of marriage and with one child. Her alleged lover, Andreu Nin, was arrested on June 16 in front of his party's headquarters on La Rambla in Barcelona, where days later he was tortured and killed by Soviet police officers on the orders of General Alexander Orlov, in the prison of Alcalá de Henares.
In 1938, the fifth novel by Mercè Rodoreda entitled Aloma was published by the Institution of Catalan Letters. This was the first work that Rodoreda accepted as hers, although later she rewrote and published it again. The same year, on behalf of the PEN Club of Catalonia, she traveled together with the Catalan writer Francesc Trabal, and read a welcome written by Carles Riba at the international congress of the PEN club in Prague.
Exile (1938-1972)
On January 23, 1939, a few months before the defeat of the Republicans, she fled into exile. Thinking that the separation would be brief, she left her son with her mother. Although she had never participated in politics, she left on the advice of her mother, who feared problems due to collaborative activities with Catalan publications and some left-wing magazines in previous years. Along with other intellectuals of the time, she went from Barcelona to Gerona with a bookmobile owned by the Ministry of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia, then she followed the path through Mas Perxés, in the municipality of Agullana, until crossing the administrative border by Le Perthus and entered Northern Catalonia on January 30. After spending the night in Le Boulou, they went to Perpignan; where they spent three days and then traveled to Toulouse by train.Roissy-en-Brie
She arrived in the French capital at the end of February and in early April she moved to Roissy-en-Brie, a town near the east of the capital. She settled in the castle of Roissy-en-Brie, an 18th-century building, which was offered as a refuge for writers. She shared a home for a few months with other intellectuals such as Anna Murià, César Augusto Jordana, Armand Obiols, Francesc Trabal and Carles Riba.In Roissy-en-Brie several love affairs arose; one of them was between Mercè Rodoreda and Armand Obiols. The problems in the castle arose because Armand Obiols was married to Francesc Trabal's sister and they had a son, who had remained in Barcelona with his mother. Furthermore, Armand Obiols' mother-in-law had traveled with Trabal to Roissy-en-Brie along with other members of the Trabal family. Consequently, this affair divided the Catalan exiles into two opposing camps. According to Anna Murià, Francesc Trabal was opposed not only by his sister but by jealousy, since he would have had a secret relationship with Mercè Rodoreda in Barcelona that only the two of them and their confidante knew. Rodoreda wanted to write a book about it called The Roissy novel, however, she never decided to do it.
The atmosphere of stability offered by the castle was disturbed by the start of World War II. At that time, some decided to flee to Latin American countries and others preferred to stay in France; this last destination was the one chosen by Rodoreda and Obiols. Later they moved to the Villa Rosset house, on the outskirts of the city.