A Arnau we read, about Verdaguer: “You gave us the language, and for it / you built prodigious palaces; / we must follow you, like a star / that sets the course”. Did you discover it very early?
— I read theAtlantis when I was 14 and freaked out so much that I spent two summers writing a long narrative poem. I still have a copy of it, but it’s horrible. I submitted it to the Ciutat de Tarragona poetry award. It’s a good thing I didn’t win it, because it would have ruined my career forever.
Did your parents know you wrote poetry early on?
– Yes. Above all, they saw that he read a lot. Another great discovery of those years was Cavafy’s poetry, especially through the translation of Eudald Solà, who took care of the most homosexual part of his work, the one that Carles Riba did not touch. I used to read Cavafy as if it were porn.
You didn’t win the Ciutat de Tarragona award, but you made your debut with The exile of Constance (Cossetània, 2008), and at the age of 23 you received the Ferrater award thanks to Calm mouths (Editions 62, 2010).
— Ferrater put a bit of pressure on me. Poetry, which until then had been something of mine, intimate and personal, suddenly became, due to the prize, something published in a very visible way.
Also because of the confessional element of what you were writing?
– Partly yes, I suppose. I would say that it has always saved me quite a bit that I have used metric. This saved me from being told that I was throwing up, although a few of my poems are. It’s funny, but the poems that people like the most are not directly about me, but I need the other poems to get to those.
Between Calm mouths i Icarus (Poncianes, 2015) five years passed. And six until Change sky (Goodall, 2021). Why?
— I entered a long spiral of closing in on myself. I was sinking deeper and deeper and sadder. I didn’t realize that what would heal me was not adding up misfortunes, but learning to enjoy.
Arnau in the book is a young man who tortures himself at the same time as he looks for other boys with disabilities.
— Like him, I too wasted a lot of time in dark rooms instead of going out to see the world as it shines. For years I have been haunted by the immediacy of sex in Barcelona. It can land you in some really sordid places. And when I say this I don’t do it to criticize these places. On the contrary: it’s a criticism I make of myself, that I didn’t know how to understand them or enjoy them. I became a kind of drug addict of a certain circuit.
A Arnau it appears a bit in the title song urinals.
– Exactly. There was a certain complacency, in this kind of self-destruction that he lived.
What made you able to get out of this maze?
— An accident of the night. This 2019 accident brought me to know anxiety by name. Mixed with work, the anxiety multiplied to the point where I had depression.
What were you doing at the time?
— I was and am a high school teacher. It’s pretty hard work, but I like it. At that moment I didn’t get to ask for leave, but I was very upset, and I saw clearly that I had to do something to save myself.
That’s how you started working on Arnauto which you ended up dedicating five years.
— At the same time, when they left me, I was making the poems ofAcropolis.
As well as Arnau is mainly set in “Barcelona, bad city”, which smells “of garam masala”, Acropolis it’s a more traveling book: Rome, Bucharest, the Camino de Sant Jaume and the neighborhood of Sant Pere and Sant Pau, in Tarragona, appear: “You were my country, my neighborhood, my sea, my Greece,” you write.
— Traveling allows you to have a dialogue with yourself that under normal circumstances is more difficult to find. If, on top of that, you go off on your own like I tend to do, I’d say that element is even more accentuated. There is a point of vanity, when it comes to showing where you have been, which I hope is not the driving force behind making the poem. Perhaps it is a rather confessional impulse, to remember experiences or moments that have been important to you.
Which Count Arnau did you have in mind when you wrote?
— It must be Joan Maragall’s. I never managed to finish Count Arnau de Sagarra. I say this a little ashamed… If we have any Catalan hero who can be redone, it is Count Arnau.
Being Catalan, he had to be a sufferer.
— It is a soul in pain. A man consumed by the desire to make fun, whether on horseback, like the character in the legend, or traveling by subway, like mine.
There is a trip to the Hell of the Great Poets and a foray into some toilets featuring three gay literary icons such as Joe Orton, David Vilaseca and Jaime Gil de Biedma.
— The latter is a small private hell. They are three authors who have helped me understand and accept a part of me.
Arnau is afraid of ending up as a decrepit visitor to the urinals whom no one wants.
— It is a certain life choice that can lead to a desperate end. Reinaldo Arenas decided to commit suicide because he had AIDS, but also because one day when he entered a urinal he realized that none of the boys around him were looking at him. Becoming someone completely invisible was terrifying to him.
The book talks about accepting that youth ends, and the need to take risks to be happy. It also celebrates friendship.
— It was the intention. I wanted to go over all the things that are bad and that we can turn into more or less good…
The conformity of leading “an office life” is worrying.
— They are all paths that can lead you to a dead end. Conformism hedonism Life sucks, isn’t it? Perhaps the only one who saves us a little is Horace.
You spent four years studying classical philology at the University of Barcelona, and Horatio also appears in the book, in relation to the need to make the most of life.
— One day when I arrived hungover, not to say outright drunk, to a talk he was giving, I said: “I know Horatio better than my mother.” And it’s kind of like that. Horacio is like a friend I always have by my side.
And what does he say to you, Horace?
— I like that his wisdom is not at all moralizing. I like, too, that he was so aware of his unimportance, and of the unimportance of writing verse. Even so, he understands that writing poetry is a way to enjoy life and make the most of time.
So it’s worth pursuing.
— If it makes sense to yourself, it makes all the sense in the world.
