Josep Pla - Works

Works

Pla lived a life completely dedicated to writing. The extent of his Obres Completes - Complete Works (46 volumes and nearly 30,000 pages), which is a collection of all his journals, reports, articles, essays, biographies, novels, and some poems gives an idea of its daunting work schedule while complicating its chronological classification. Many of these pages are the fruit of a hard process of rewriting texts from his youth and weekly articles that were published in Destino for nearly 40 years, as well as hundreds of articles published in different newspapers and an abundance of correspondences.

Thematic classification is not easy either, as many articles appeared in different locations with some changes, his thematic repertoire is extensive and, above all, the boundaries between the genres that he developed are not always clear.

However, we can make an attempt at organizing into genres (the years outlined correspond to the original publication, not to the translation or the reissue of Complete Works).

• Narratives: Coses vistes (1925), Linterna mágica (1926), Relaciones (1927) are books in which narration predominates but foreshadows and hints at other genres which later will be fundamental in his work. La vida amarga, El carrer estret (1952) and Aigua de mar are later narratives.

• Books of notable events and memories: the book of notable events gives Pla great liberty in the combined use of different genres - the personal diary, description, narration, dialogue, personal reflections, advice to the reader, the portrait and analysis of the customs of people and towns. El quadern gris is a book of notable events that was devoted to Pla. It was not an authentic diary, but a “literary” book of notable events, compiled later. The central themes of the book of notable events are the countryside and geography of Ampurdán, descriptions of daily life and the narrator-author’s obsession with writing.

• Anthropological and folkloric essays: Los labradores (1952), El payés y su mundo and Les hores (1953).

• Biography: Vida de Manolo (1928), Santiago Rusiñol y su tiempo (1955), Francesc Cambó (1928–1930), Homenots, Retrats del passaport y Tres senyores. Other apparently biographical works are Girona (1952), Primera Volada, Notes disperses y Notes del capvesprol.

• Travel writing: Les illes, Viatge a la Catalunya Vella, Italia i el Mediterrano, Les Amèriques, Sobre París i França, Cartas de lejos and Israel, 1957 (1957)

• Political writing: Madrid. El advenimiento de la República (1933), Crónicas parlamentarias (1933–1934) and (1934–1936)

During the first years of the Francoist regime, due of the complete restriction of the Catalan edition, the following works were published in Spanish: Guía de la Costa Brava (1941), Las ciudades del mar (1942), Viaje en autobús (1942) – considered one of his greatest works, and which proves his skillful grasp of the Spanish language -, Rusiñol y su tiempo (1942), El pintor Joaquín Mir (1944), Un señor de Barcelona (1945) y La huida del tiempo (1945). In 1947, as soon as censorship was lifted, he returned to publishing in Catalan (Cadaqués, one of his most successful books).

After 1956 he started the first series of his Complete Works, which extended to 29 volumes and in which he began to publish his extraordinary portrayals Homenots (Grandes tipos). In 1966, Ediciones Destino began the publication of this series. The first volume was an unpublished work, El quadern gris, a book of notable events initially written when he was only a little over 20 years of age (although rewritten and substantially expanded later). It was translated into Spanish as El cuaderno gris by Dionisio Ridruejo and which was considered a before and after in the public consideration of Pla, much more than as a journalist, as the best narrator of contemporary Catalan literature. The success of the criticism and publicity of this work convinced Vergés to continue publishing the complete work, which has reached volume XLVI, with unpublished manuscripts (such as his Notas para un diario, written in the mid-1960s), not free from controversy, by the supposed amendments and manipulations to which Vergés himself was subjected (apparently, in order to suppress certain obscene passages). Later Keerl, his heir, became much more preoccupied with economically exploiting the documents than putting them at the disposal of investigators or the Josep Pla Foundation.

Even though he did not write plays, his life and work inspired various significant works after his death, among which are: Ara que els ametllers ja estan batuts (Now that the almond trees have been knocked down) 1990, in which Josep Maria Flotats creates a portrait of Pla through a collage of his texts. Also La increíble historia del Dr. Floït & Mr. Pla (1997), a production by Els Joglars, which recreates the work of Robert Louis Stevenson where the characters Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are, respectively, a Catalan industrialist obsessed with wealth and, on the other side, an educated and indulgent writer which personifies the opposed values of industrial bourgeoisie, based on Pla.

His liberal-conservative thought, skeptical and uncompromising, filled with irony and common sense, still resounds today, even though it seems to contradict the current cultural establishment the same as it did the previous establishment. His books remain in print, and both Spanish and Catalan critics have unanimously recognized him as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.