Joan Maragall

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joan Maragall

Joan Maragall i Gorina (born October 10, 1860 in Barcelona , † December 20, 1911 there ) was a Catalan poet. He was the main exponent of literary modernism and the most influential poet of Catalan modernism.

Life

As the youngest child and only son of a textile manufacturer, Joan Maragall would later take over the company. However, he studied law from 1884 and devoted himself to his poetic and literary inclinations. In 1886, after a bad investment, he helped to save his father's business, but then withdrew from the business in order to continue to be active as a journalist.

Maragall was already a recognized poet and journalist during his lifetime, whose opinion was held in high regard in intellectual circles and beyond. He was one of the most important impulses for the strived for modernization of Catalan culture, the so-called Modernisme , which u. a. in his collaboration on various publications of this cultural movement - L'Avenç , Catalonia i Luz - and newspaper articles for Diario de Barcelona and La Veu de Catalunya . He identified himself with the traditional and Catholic Catalan bourgeoisie, but turned down offers from Enric Prat de la Riba and Francesc Cambó to become politically active and to stand for election as MPs.

Despite his rather conservative and fundamentally apolitical attitude, on the occasion of the unrest of the Setmana Tràgica of 1909, he urged the bourgeoisie to take greater social responsibility, criticized the frozen practice of the church, which was alienated from the people, and openly advocated the anarchist educator Francesc Ferrer I, who was sentenced to death Guàrdia a. At the national level, he was in favor of an Iberian federation in which Spain, Catalonia and Portugal should be equal partners.

Maragall married Clara Noble in 1891; the couple had 13 children, including the sculptor Ernest Maragall . Joan Maragall died at the age of 51 from an illness diagnosed as »Febre de Malta« ( brucellosis ). His death caused consternation and thousands attended his funeral in Barcelona . He is buried in the Cementiri de Sant Gervasi cemetery in Barcelona.

Today, next to streets in almost every Catalan town, numerous schools and a park in Barcelona are named after him. His house is set up as a museum and archive (Arxiu Joan Maragall). The double anniversary year 2010/2011 (150th birthday, 100th anniversary of death) was celebrated in Catalonia as "Any Maragall" with numerous events, publications and projects that are documented on a separate website. His grandson Pasqual Maragall was mayor of Barcelona from 1982–1997 (also during the 1992 Olympic Games) and from 2003–2006 President of the Generalitat de Catalunya , the Catalan autonomous government; another grandson, Ernest Maragall , was their education minister from 2006-2010.

plant

Maragall wrote all of his poetic work in his native Catalan , but he wrote many of his journalistic articles and essays in Spanish. In 1881 he won the Flor Natural prize at the highly regarded Jocs Florals with his poem Dins sa cambra ('In his room') .

His poetry is characterized by the use of unaffected everyday language and the striving for simplicity and immediacy of feeling; He expressed his poetic principles in the theory of paraula viva ('living word').

Seven volumes of poetry were published during his lifetime, as well as several collections of newspaper articles and essays. Four editions of his Complete Works have been created so far.

Maragall dealt intensively with German-language literature and culture, especially with Goethe - whose Faust he translated and whose Nausicaa fragment he worked out into his own drama - with Nietzsche and with Novalis . He also translated works a. a. by Homer , Schiller , Reinick , Wagner , Daudet and Lamartine and thus made a decisive contribution to the development of Catalan as a modern literary language.

Web links

Commons : Joan Maragall  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
personal data
SURNAME Maragall, Joan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maragall i Gorina, Joan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Catalan poet, essayist and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Barcelona
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 1911
Place of death Barcelona