Gabriel Ferrater
(Gabriel Ferrater i Soler; Reus, 1922-Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1972) Spanish poet in the Catalan language.Specialist in mathematics and linguistics, literary and artistic critic, he is the author of an interesting poetic work, marked by his opposition to romantic poetry ( Women and days , 1968).
Gabriel Ferrater
The son of a bourgeois family, he did not attend school until the age of ten, educating himself particularly and with the support of a respectable family library.In the autumn of 1938 he went to Bordeaux (France), where his father had been appointed counselor of the Spanish consulate.If until this moment his important literary readings had been Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, Jorge Guillén and Carles Riba, since then he would add his knowledge of the French classics: Montaigne, Jean Racine, François de La Rochefoucauld, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and Cardinal de Retz.On the other hand, this unusual school situation would allow him to learn to read in English and German and to discover great contemporary authors such as James Joyce, André Gide, Ernst Jünger and Henry de Montherlant.
In 1941, after his return to Spain, this training would be expanded with readings on philosophy (in particular, on German phenomenology and the work of José Ortega y Gasset).In the autumn of 1947 Gabriel Ferrater began his studies of Exact Sciences at the University of Barcelona, introduced himself to mathematical thinking and analytical philosophy and began to interact with a group of Barcelona painters.
From this relationship and from a visit to the Prado Museum, his interest in painting arose, about which his first writings, appeared in the magazine Laye , whose section of Art critic was responsible between 1951 and 1953.In those same years, he began his relationship with the poet and Hellenist Carles Riba, who, separated from the university after the Civil War, taught privately in gatherings formed mainly by poets and intellectuals.At the same time he became friends with the poets Jaime Gil de Biedma and Carlos Barral.
This relationship with the poets and the reading of the English Shakespeare, John Donne, Thomas Hardy and WH Auden, the German Bertolt Brecht and the medieval classics (mainly Ausiàs March) revived in him his old interest in literature, so that, between 1953 and 1964, the practice of poetry was his main dedication, shared only with the inevitable editorial works (reading reports) and translations (of Ernest Hemingway, Peter Weiss, Hjalmar Söderberg, Ernst Gombrich and Manfred Bierwich into Spanish for the Seix Barral publishing house) that allowed him to survive and that he would continue to perform throughout his life.
His poetic work, written in Catalan, is late in appearance and, although brief, shows full maturity.Gabriel Ferrater's poetry is classically didactic and his contribution to the poetics of his time consists in the formulation of a problematic moral experience, presented through an objective correlate of realistic figuration and woven into a controlled, metrically strict formal structure, of Precise lexicon and logical syntax.The themes of Ferraterian poetry come from the observation (and self-observation) of the effect of human actions and passions, inscribed within the framework of both individual and collective history, which gives his poetry a high testimonial value.On the other hand, his best poems achieve an intense degree of pathos due to the sincerity and lucidity with which an experience that is as personal and intimate as it is irrefutable is exposed or communicated.
In 1960 he published Da nuces pueris , his first book of poems, which was a surprise in the Catalan literary field because of its originality.The writer broke with the traditional schemes (of language and form) of Catalan poetry of the last decades, since he dealt with in a very unconventional tone a set of themes (such as civil war, eroticism or a new morality) that, they had been largely overlooked by postwar poetics.The poem In memoriam is among the most significant in the book.
Menja't una cama ( Eat a leg ), from 1962, followed the Same line, although focusing mainly on the erotic theme.However, it must be borne in mind that his poems speak of a "moral eroticism" very different from the traditional romantic outburst. Teoria dels cossos ( Theory of bodies ), 1966, was his last book; It is a work composed of three parts, one of which is a long composition entitled "Poema uncabat", where the influence of the medieval French author Chrétien de Troyes is appreciated.
In Les dones i els dies ( Women and days , 1968) he brought together the poems of the three previous books, highlighting in the title the main themes of his poetry: human relationships, love and friendship and the passage of time, which is a true obsession in Ferrater.All of this leads to a skeptical and rationalistic world view, with a certain tendency to pessimism.Gabriel Ferrater's poetics is part of a certain type of narrative realism that seeks the expression of moral experience.It is, in short, an anti-romantic poetry, expressed in a language close to colloquial and focused on content.
In 1964, after having lived a year in Hamburg (Germany), where he worked at the German publisher Rowolth, Gabriel Ferrater returned to Barcelona and held the position of literary director of the publishing house Seix Barral, a position that He soon left for the now familiar casual jobs that, although they provided him little salary, left him the margin of freedom necessary for the dedication to what would be his last activity, linguistics.In 1962 he had enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Barcelona, and at that time began systematic readings of Catalan grammar, which confirmed his interest in philology and linguistics.
To his already extensive knowledge of language he added that of contemporary linguistics theorists: he studied the generative transformationalism of Noam Chomsky (from whom he translated Cartesian Linguistics into Spanish), structuralism of Émile Benveniste and Leonard Bloomfield (whose work Language translated the descriptive chapters) and other linguists, becoming one of the first introductory specialists of this discipline in Spain; For this reason, in 1968 he was hired by the Autonomous University of Barcelona as a professor of Linguistics and Literary Criticism, which institutionalized a teaching activity that Ferrater had already carried out since 1967, through occasional courses and a notable activity as a lecturer and essayist, both on linguistics and literary subjects.
The linguistic field includes the articles that, with the generic title of De causis linguae , published between 1969 and 1972 in the Catalan journal Serra d'Or , as well as the notes written for his 1971-1972 course on a transformational grammar of Catalan, whose final formulation would have been his most linguistic work and which his suicide interrupted.His essay work was published posthumously, grouped by subject and in different books: On literature (1979), The poetry of Carles Riba (1979), On painting (1981) and Sobre el llenguatge (1981).Various occasional writings and documents of a private and journalistic nature were also edited in a book entitled Papers.Cartes.Paraules (1986).The last published posthumous title was J.V.Foix i el seu temps (1987).
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