THE LITERARY LANGUAGE IN MALLORCA THEWRITERS OF MALLORCAHAVE DRAWN IN WORDS THEIR OWN PARTICULAR RELATIONS WITH EVERYTHING AROUND THEM. FROMRAMON LLULL DOWN TO OUR OWN DAY, THEY HAVE FOLLOWED A LONG PROCESS OF CREATION WHICH IS THE CONTRIBUTION BY THE MAJORCANSTO THE NORMALIZATION OF THE LANGUAGE. MARlA DE LA PAU JANER A U T H 0 R CATALONIA amon Llull, the most universal Ma- Maria Antdnia Salva, Miquel Ferra, Llorens jorcan of all time, devoted his life to Riber ... It was Llorens Riber who in La mi- an engaging project as a nyonia ¿'un infant orat, beautiful memories traveller travelling the ~athsof a multiple of childhood, recreated in words his own ideological and stylistic territory, always in particular paradise lost. love with words. Determined to carry out A universe not so very different in its land- the task of converting the infidels to ehris- scapes from the one Bartomeu Rosselló Pdr- tianity, he chose to persuade all those who cel evoked from his place of exile when he listened, the sages of his time, women and created the fiction of the island in his men, through language. And so he wrote, poem A Mallorca, durant la guerra civil. in Proverbis de Ramon, "lf in the day one This is a farewell to the place this poet, who has heard many words, through habit of died at the age of twenty-four, remembers listening, when he shall sleep he shall with longing: dream certain semblances of these words; All my life is tied to you and if the blood should rule in him, he will as the flames to hedarkness in the night. perforce dream them with pleasure". During the war exile came to be an artifice (Prov., 21 4). It is now seven hundred years and was expressed through language. Be- since Ramon Llull told us that words draw cause literary language has often been re- people's dreams, their ability to explain duced to civil death and has been ban- life. And this perhaps, is the beginning of ished across the sea. the road, of the contribution made by the But literary language is also the commit- Majorcans over the ages to the common ment to words which the poet Josep Maria literary language, to the normalization of Llompart expressed in Memories i confes- Catalan. sions ¿'un adolescent de casa bona in a We know that language is, in the first ins- homage to Pompeu Fabra: tance, a to01 for man, an instrument for .. .and the words communication. Often at the service of have ripened in me like a fruit. science, of the complexity of thought that is Now Iam theirs andperhaps of men. only expressed through words, in search of There is plenty of sensuality in the literary precision and accuracy. But language also language of Blai Bonet, the poet from creates a literary space whose borders can Santanyí, of baroque in the images of Llo- be vague. Because it's difficult to pinpoint rens Moya, and the feast of the words of exactly where Literature begins. Perhaps it Jaume Vidal Alcover. Because words arises the moment an aesthetic will exists, have followed a long road through history when the protagonists of the communicat- as they have gradually taken shape. As ive act, the emitter and the receiver, confer they explained the co-ordinates that ruled an artistic will on their message. the lives of the men of this land. This is This is why literary language is constructed why the writers of the seventies spoke of in the writer's thinking, giving the language colours of the sea, the headlong flight of the island through the words themselves, the maximum expressive capacity, explor- time. These were hours of uncertainty for the of an island whose will was broken by the ing all its possibilities in search of a creative language, when Pompeu Fabra had not yet tourist boom, that was dressed up until it normality. Creators give form through lang- completed his Diccionari de la llengua cata- almost became the great unknown. And uage to fictitious realities, and choose the lana and writers, in spite of the disorder in Palma, too, was a far cry from that city most appropriate register in which to inven- the life of their words, were well aware of ~rotectedby the gende shade of the cathe- tory reality and pass it on to others, like a their power. The words of the poet Maria dral, around which it spread amongst legacy for the future. Experience, then, is Aguiló, defender of Renaissance ideals, had sleeping palaces. The city of drunks and manifested through literary language. A had their effect and his verses became the clerics described by Llorens Villalonga, literary language which, as a testimony to ensign for the other Majorcan poets: the sceptical author who never believed time and space, allows us to perceive life. the race which gains its language that literature was a linguistic elaboration. The writers of Mallorca have drawn in regains itself All the same, he left us the legends created words their own particular relations with It was in 1925 that Pompeu Fabra visited by his words. everything that surrounds them. From Ra- Mallorca to take part in the celebrations A world of individual options which mon Llull down to our own day, they have marking the centenary of the birth of Maria through the work of all make up the common followed a long process of creation. A pro- Aguiló. On the sarne occasion, Joan Alco- treasure. Writing in Catalan in Mallorca cess which is, undoubtedly, the contribution ver spoke of Aguiló's poetic expres- through the years, between uncertainty and by Majorcan writers to the normalization of siveness. A poetic expressiveness which he the will to make headway, offering the fu- the language. Remember the solemn himself, through the recreation of the lan- ture the keepsakes wrought from living, re- groping for words of the Maiorcan Roman- guage, had learned to work with. Because newed language -this is what the writers of tics, authors such as Gabriel Maura or Pere Joan Alcover and Miquel Costa i Llobera the Balearic Islands have been able to con- dfAlcantara Penya, their striving to des- were the masters of the Maiorcan School, tribute: the richness of words in the search for cribe the towns and villages of the island, he the model for a whole generation of poets: normality through Literature. .