Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí (; 10 October 1908 – 13 April 1983) was a Catalan novelist, who wrote in the Catalan language.
She is considered the most influential contemporary Catalan language writer, as evidenced by other authors' references to her work and her international reputation, 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 ('The diamond square', translated as The Time of the Doves, 1962) 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, another of her artistic talents was discovered, painting, which had remained in the background due to Rodoreda prioritizing 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 (which would later become the Institute of Theater). Her mother also had an interest in music. From 1915 to 1917 she attended the Lurdes School in the Sarrià neighborhood, and from 1917 to 1920 she went to 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 (of whom he had been a friend) 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. |Mercè Rodoreda, Imatges d'infantesa (Images of childhood)
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, recovered for the story The bathroom, within the work Twenty-two stories.
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
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. During that time, she wrote verses, a theatrical comedy (which remains defunct), and a novel. 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.
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. At that time, she began to read the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Noteworthy works include The Boy and The House, dedicated to her son, and The Sheet, which she dedicated to Josep Carner.
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. That same year, she separated from her husband Joan Gurguí, after nine years of marriage and with one child.
In 1938, the fifth novel by Mercè Rodoreda titled Aloma was published by the Institute 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. 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. She then followed the path through Mas Perxés, in the municipality of Agullana, until she crossed 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. Furthermore, Armand Obiols' mother-in-law had traveled with Trabal to Roissy-en-Brie along with other members of the Trabal family. |Mercè Rodoreda in the interview A fondo (1981)
For twelve days they were sheltered in a farm until the signing of the armistice of 22 June 1940, after which they crossed the Loire River through the town of Meung-sur-Loire, which was completely destroyed. From there they traveled even further south, this time settling in Limoges. With the poem Món d'Ulisses, Rodoreda won for the second time the Natural Flower of the Floral Games of 1948 in Paris, a poem that was published in the magazine La Nostra Revista that same year. Albes i nits gave her the third victory in the Floral Games contest and, consequently, she was named "Mestre en Gai Saber" in Montevideo in 1949. That same year she visited Barcelona for the first time after exile.
In 1951, she also approached painting, interested above all in painters such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Joan Miró, and she made some of her own creations. In a 1954 letter to Armand Obiols she explains that she already had a "style and a world" in painting, yet she acknowledged that her place was in writing.
Geneva
In 1954, Rodoreda and Obiols moved into an apartment at 19 Violet street, in a bourgeois neighborhood in the city of Geneva. In this city, she always felt exiled and even recognized that Geneva "is a very boring city, suitable for writing". Shortly after, Obiols had to move to Vienna for work reasons. That same year, Rodoreda made a trip to Barcelona to attend the wedding of her son, Jordi Gurguí i Rodoreda. Likewise, for her story Carnaval she was awarded the Joan Santamaria Prize in Barcelona that same year. Some of these stories had already been published in Mexico during her exile in France, while others were unpublished. As the author confessed, this book came from a technical crisis that led to an unequal literary level among the various stories, although they were tied by a thematic unit.
According to some unpublished annotations that spoke of Geneva, during those years Rodoreda saw writers such as Eugeni Xammar, Julio Cortázar and his wife, and Jorge Semprún. In 1960, she submitted the novel to the Premi Sant Jordi de novel·la, previously known as the Joanot Martorell Prize. She did not win, but her novel Vivir es no facil (Living is not easy) won the Enric Massó y Urgellès prize. Joan Fuster also sent her to 'The Novelists Club', which at that time was run by Joan Sales. Sales was delighted by the novel and started a correspondence with Rodoreda. When it was published in 1962, the novel was not exactly the one that had been presented for the Sant Jordi prize, but it had received an extension both in chapters and in corrections by Salas, Obiols and the author herself.