I am in Ithaca! It seems absurd, but here I am. I think of the friends with whom I believe the Odyssey is the most beautiful book in the world.” In September 1927, Carles Riba wrote euphorically to Josep Maria de Sagarra while visiting Greece. The patronage of the Fundació Bernat Metge by Francesc Cambó allowed the Hellenist to travel through the landscapes of the authors he had translated. Like this last month, when the foundation’s Casa dels Clàssics presented Odissea, the recent Catalan translation by Pau Sabaté.
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Odysseus, in the original Greek, is back in fashion. Bookstores dedicate a corner to Homer’s epic poem taking advantage of the premiere, today Friday, of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. A new film adaptation starring Matt Damon (Ulysses), Anne Hathaway (Penelope), and Tom Holland (Telemachus), among a cast of Hollywood stars like Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron. And after last year’s more modest release, The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.
For over a century, the return of the king to his home, Ithaca, after the Trojan War, has sparked interest in Catalonia and especially in Catalan nationalism. Although not always in the same way. In its first twenty years, political Catalanism paid little attention. It was the theatrical premiere of Nausica, in April 1912, that gave it centrality in its imagination. The magazine El Teatre Català referred to it as a “Catalanized Ulysses.” Joan Maragall’s posthumous work delved into the encounter between the young Nausica, daughter of the king of the Phaeacians, and the mature Ulysses, in a play between desire and renunciation.
But it was Carles Riba who published the first translation of the classic into Catalan. It was in 1919 at Editorial Catalana, directed by Josep Carner and sponsored by the leaders of the Lliga Regionalista, Enric Prat de la Riba and Francesc Cambó. Dissatisfied with the result, Riba would translate it completely again. The writer has been the true driving force, as author and translator, of the persistent interest in the Odyssey in Catalonia.
In the twenties, the Greek hero gained prominence. Acció Catalana, a split towards the center-left from the Lliga, urged youth not to be led by “false Ulysses” who took them – like him with his crew – to individual selfishness, instead of focusing them on the struggle for the Catalanist ideal. It was a criticism of the lligaires.
The Catholic weekly Catalunya Social also invited young people to “resist the siren songs” and not to be carried away by dishonorable attitudes. Ulysses was a warning, but also a beacon. For Josep Maria de Sagarra, his heroism was “the most positive and effective” and full of “judgment and irony.” The writer maintained in La Publicitat that he was an ideal of humanity.
In the twenties, two works that had the Odyssey as a reference made an impact. James Joyce’s Ulysses, which the press talked about a lot, although few had read it because, published in English in 1922, it had not been translated into French, and even less into Catalan. And Charles Maurras’s 1923 Le mystère d’Ulisse. A poem in which the journey meant the return to his native Provence and the monarchical regime, tradition, order, homeland. Motifs that influenced Catalanists who followed the French regionalist, far-right, and anti-Semitic, as journalist Josep M. Junoy evidenced in the Revista de Catalunya.
Far from this reference, the Odyssey appeared as a comic strip in the children’s magazine Virolet in 1930. Then two uses of Ulysses’ adventures also became common, little or not at all frequent until then. On one hand, the word “odyssey” to refer to a very complicated path. When that year, Francesc Macià returned from exile, without the dictatorship’s permission, and was sent back to Belgium, the weekly Mirador referred to his journey this way and depicted him as the hero.
On the other, Jaume Bofill i Mates, in November 1930 in La Publicitat, proposed the image of “Catalonia-Penelope.” The writer and politician referred to the country that waits and undoes what it does, like the king’s wife undoing at night the shroud she wove by day. An image also used by the separatists of Nosaltres Sols! by Daniel Cardona.
While bombs fall in 1938, Riba reads the thesis on Maragall’s ‘Nausica’; and in 1942, the Greek hero appears in ‘Elegies de Bierville’
Already in 1938, while Italian aviation bombed Barcelona, Carles Riba defended his doctoral thesis on Maragall’s Nausica before the university tribunal. After losing the Civil War, in republican exile, the Greek hero appeared in his poetry collection Elegies de Bierville (1943). “I have sailed like Ulysses on the noble sea,” he said, because exile transforms and forces one to maintain one’s own name and that of the homeland. Riba returned that year.
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Who also returned in 1948 was Joan Oliver. The poet explained to philosopher Josep Ferrater Mora that after his “return to Ithaca” during his absence, “the scoundrel Penelope has done nothing but undo.” And the Francoists, “every day, at the end of the day, empty the contents of the drawer into their pockets, and still reserve the right of the first night.” And even from exile, Josep Carner wrote in 1957 ‘Ulisses pensa en Ítaca.’ A poem in which Ithaca is a mental space, a product of imagination and memory. And for the prince of poets, it only becomes real again with the hero’s return.
Thus, exile produced a change in the Catalanist imagination. Ulysses and his behavior lost centrality to be replaced by the journey and destiny as protagonists. Riba himself paved this change by translating poems by the Greek Konstantinos Kavafis. Among them ‘Ithaca,’ which conveyed the idea that the journey is more important than arriving. The collection was published in 1962, when Riba had already died, but it exerted a great influence on Lluís Llach.
The young singer-songwriter presented in July 1975 the album Viatge a Itaca setting to music, with tweaks – and making it flat, Ithaca – Kavafis’s poem with its well-known beginning, “When you set out on the journey to Ithaca, pray that the road is long, full of adventures, full of knowledge.” Against Joan Manuel Serrat’s Penelope, a song of romantic disenchantment published six years earlier, Llach’s, at the start of the transition, became a political anthem of a personal and collective revolution that marked a hope that had a different meaning for each one. The song marked more than one generation of Catalans. Among them, anti-Franco politicians. Especially the left-wing ones, who were the ones who most spoke of Ithaca in a political key.
In 1985, the PSC leader, Raimon Obiols, used the Odyssey as an example of a path to end the emerging Pujolist hegemony. In 1994, Girona, under socialist mayor Joaquim Nadal, twinned with the island of Ithaca. And still, in 1997, in that same city, the Prudenci Bertrana prize was awarded to Ulisses a alta mar by Baltasar Porcel. A novel about a Mallorcan journalist living in Barcelona who, in the midst of an existential crisis, embarks on a cruise to visit the settings of the Homeric journey. The following year Joan Alberich translated Homer’s work into prose, making it more accessible for teaching.
During the eighties and nineties, columnists drew parallels between the political destinies of parties and Odysseus’s journey. But the one who arrived in Ithaca after 23 years was socialism. In December 2003, in his speech as a candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat, Pasqual Maragall expressed that “like in Ulysses’s symbolic journey, we have gone further and now we have landed on a new island.” And he added that the country in four years would be different “and thus Catalonia will make its way, like Ulysses to Ithaca.”
Lluís Llach publishes in 1975 ‘Viatge a Itaca,’ where he sets Kavafis’s poem to music with tweaks, against Serrat’s ‘Penelope’
In May 2006, at the Barça celebration of the league title, player Oleguer Presas exclaimed, “Even if they call us dreamers, we keep walking towards utopia. We keep advancing towards Ithaca,” after publishing, together with Roc Casagran, the autobiographical book Camí d’Ítaca. At that time, the new Statute was being approved, modified, in the Cortes and in a referendum in Catalonia. Symbolically, the cry of the pro-independence footballer announced that the reference was changing sides.
At the close of the campaign for the November 2010 Catalan elections, Artur Mas said that CiU was “like the old navigator, about to anchor.” The following year, Joan Francesc Mira made a new translation of the Odyssey into contemporary Catalan. As if inspired, Mas, already as president of the Generalitat, at the start of the independence process in 2012 said: “We want the great majority of Catalans to accompany us on this journey to Ithaca.” Two years later, following Jordi Pujol’s parliamentary appearance over unregulated foreign accounts, CUP deputy David Fernàndez told him: “The procés will bury Pujolism and on the journey to Ithaca you will have no reserved seat.”
After October 1, 2017, Lluís Llach’s song only served for ten thousand musicians to sing it to demand the freedom of those imprisoned for the vote. Two years later, Xavier Domènech and Joan Tardà published the conversational book Entre Ítaca i Icària. Since then, the simile seems exhausted.
Catalonia, however, has never lost sight of the Odyssey. Now that British researchers claim that Ulysses’s real Homeric homeland is not the current island of Ithaca, but the Paliki peninsula on the Ionian island of Cephalonia, who knows if alongside Nolan’s epic adaptation, Catalanism will build a new metaphor for its situation and that of the country.
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