Joan Alcover i Maspons. Enciclopèdia.cat
(Palma, Mallorca, 3 May 1854 – Palma, Mallorca, 25 February 1926)
Poet, essayist and politician.
From a blessed urban family, he studied at the Balearic Institute, where he was a disciple of Pons i Gallarza and a classmate, among others, of Costa i Llobera, Joan Ll. Estelrich and Antoni Maura.
In 1869 he began his law degree in Barcelona, where he reaffirmed his literary affection, came into contact with the Renaissance movement and wrote a good part of his first poems and stories, alternately in Spanish and in a dialectal and insecure Catalan. His first poetic publications were published in the pages of Revista Balear (1872-74).
After obtaining a law degree at the age of twenty-four, he settled permanently in Mallorca, married Rosa Pujol from Barcelona and began to practice. During these years he adopted provincial attitudes that coincided with his professional ascension —councillor of the Palma City Council, 1879; provincial deputy for Manacor, 1883; Relator of the Audience, 1886-1926, and deputy to the Cortes for the Liberal Party, 1893 and with active militancy within Mallorcan Maurism. This personal process had an ideological and literary impact on him: he became the typification of the provincial intellectual who conceives art as a refuge, and so he ended up organizing a gathering in his house that brought together the island's literary people and welcomed the artists and writers who visited the island. On the other hand, he abdicated the vague literary Catalanism and, consequently, his poetry was, until the volume of the century, practically entirely in Spanish. In 1887, the year of the death of his first wife (by whom he had his children Pere, Teresa and Gaietà), he published in Mallorca the volume Poesías, which he republished in 1892 in a second enlarged edition. In 1891 he married María de Haro y Rosselló, who died in 1931. In 1892 he published New Poems, which include the translation into Catalan of Carducci's poem Fantasy. Poems and Harmonies (1894) and Meteors followed. Poems, Apologists and Stories (1901), the year of the death of his daughter Teresa. Superficial poetry predominates in this production, in imitation of Campoamor, and, very diluted, the influence of Leopardi, Lamartine, Carducci, Hugo, etc.
Some of the most successful poems hint at the creative possibilities that manifested themselves when a personal crisis was overcome. This, which took place in the early years of the twentieth century, was basically due to the awareness of failure as a poet in Castilian – despite the praise of his friends Menéndez y Pelayo, Valera, Blanco García, Estelrich, etc. – and the unexpected success of some Catalan poems made to order: La sierra, homenaje a Costa y Llobera, and La reliquia, Rusiñol's request for an album. In these poems, Alcover broke with youthful mimicry and glossed, in the first, a popular song, which became an exaltation of rurality, and in the second, he nostalgically evoked the mal du siècle, sharpened by the memory of the wife and daughter, both dead.
Spurred on by Costa, Alomar, Oliver and other friends, by the successes soon achieved in Barcelona and, probably, by the language campaigns of Mossèn Alcover, he partly revised his ideology and incorporated himself into the native literature with the acceptance of the presuppositions of political Catalanism postulated by the Lliga Regionalista. He participated in the Floral Games of Barcelona (1905, the year of the death of his son Pedro; 1907, and 1909, in which he was proclaimed a master of gay knowledge); in the lectures that Mallorcan intellectuals gave at the Ateneo Barcelonès (1904), and in the First Congress of the Catalan Language (1906) with the paper "The Catalan language is among us the only possible expression of the writer-artist". In a few years he became one of the first figures of Catalan poetry, which the appearance of Cap al tard (1909), his first book in Catalan, concurred. In this book he collected several types of poetry: the famous elegies, true major pieces; the songs of the sierra or visions of the country; the arrangements or poems addressed to other writers, and some youthful. Aesthetically, they are an eclectic and personal version of Modernism and with these works he managed to return Catalan poetry to a level of high perfection.
Nine years later he published Biblical Poems (1918), which, on the whole and despite undoubted successes, are of a minor tone. The recourse to the Bible, in addition to indicating one of his favorite readings, insinuated the beginning of a poetic sterility caused by the weight of the years and, above all, by family blunders. Thus, in 1919, when he won the Fastenrath prize, Alcover lost, on the same day, in Barcelona and Mallorca, respectively, his children Gaietà and Maria. From then on, new additions were few and far between, and often came down to reworkings or translations of earlier pieces. It is worth mentioning the haikai and chispas —short poems— and, in another sense, the mastery he exercised over numerous poets of the Principality and the members of the so-called Mallorcan School.
Complementing his poetic activity are the lectures collected in Arte y literatura (1904) and in Reacción literaria (1910), the speeches of the Floral Games, and the articles and literary portraits. Of the first volume, the lecture "Humanization of Art" is especially significant, an authentic aesthetic statement on the links between creation and experience, to the detriment of the postulates of art for art's sake. Overall, in these writings, with agile and elegant prose, he left critical judgments of great acuteness —such as the one he dedicated to Modernism—, observations on his readings and comments on the theoretical writings of Carlyle, Taine, Schopenhauer and Tolstoj. His conception of art, not without contradictions, is of particular interest, together with the purpose he attributed to it.
His work, published numerous times, was collected in the Complete Works (1951), which is the most comprehensive edition, although the writings – perhaps lost – of a political nature are missing, an aspect in which Alcover has been neglected. Correspondent of the Royal Spanish Academy (1904), the Academy of Good Letters of Barcelona (1913) and the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (1916), he participated in the edition of the works of Costa and Oliver.
Some of his poems have been translated into several languages and set to music (La Balanguera, by Amadeu Vives, which in 1996 was declared the official anthem of Mallorca).
Enciclopèdia.cat
la Balanguera filarà.
com una aranya d'art subtil,
buida que buida sa filosa,
de nostra vida treu el fil.
Com una parca bé cavil·la
teixint la tela per demà.
La Balanguera fila, fila,
la Balanguera filarà.
Girant la ullada cap enrera
guaita les ombres de l'avior,
i de la nova primavera
sap on s'amaga la llavor.
Sap que la soca més s'enfila
com més endins pot arrelar.
La Balanguera fila, fila,
la Balanguera filarà.
Quan la parella ve de noces,
ja veu i compta sos minyons;
veu com devallen a les fosses
els que ara viuen d'il·lusions,
els que a la plaça de la vila
surten a riure i a cantar.
La Balanguera fila, fila,
la Balanguera filarà.
Bellugant l'aspi, el fil cabdella,
i de la pàtria la visió
fa bategar son cor de vella
sota la sarja del gipó.
Dins la profunda nit tranquil·la,
destria l'auba qui vendrà.
La Balanguera fila, fila,
la Balanguera filarà.
De tradicions i d'esperances
tix la senyera pel jovent
com qui fa un vel de noviances
amb cabelleres d'or i argent
de la infantesa que s'enfila,
de la vellura que se'n va.
La Balanguera fila, fila,
la Balanguera filarà.
Joan Alcover
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