Vinyoli Poetic Route

Joan Vinyoli and Begur

Joan Vinyoli (1914 – 1984) arrived in Begur in August 1954 and returned every summer until 1978, with his family and friends.

His stays in Begur profoundly marked his poetry, he wrote and corrected much of the work he later published there. He always carried a small folder of erasers with poems, blank pages, postcards, and apart from the group, at one of the tables in the Frigola bar, in Can Garreta d’Aiguablava or at a table in Aiguafreda, he wrote while soaking up the landscape and the smells, until little by little around the aperitif the conversation began, while the women sunbathed and the children played.

From the first contact, the poet was dazzled by the beauty of Begur and its coves. The Begur imaginary, the deep sea, the sky, the nights, the constellations, the Begur and Montgrí castles, the wheel button, the stairs, the Tramuntana wind, the lighthouses, the Norfeu cape, the boats and winches, the rum, the islands, the rice fields, the fish, the nets, the fishermen, the tree that leaves the forest called by the sea… are very present in all his work and have a symbolic content that is repeated in a kind of poetic spiral, always enriching with new experiences.
Begur, therefore, marks the period of his vital and poetic fullness, which culminated in the last years of his life. That is why Joan Vinyoli will state: “the important and definitive place as the center of my experiences of all kinds, poetic and vital, was Begur”.

Frigola Bar and Vila Square

The Vinyolis and their friends went there often, it was a meeting place, coffees, snacks, evenings, sardanas and xerinola, which was a selection of fashionable dances.

From the 1964 poem Sunt lacrimae rerum
Now I’m a scared rat coming out of the dark
and runs to hide in any hole.
But when I remember friends who have died,
irrevocably, the irreplaceable,
I become a sunflower that rises from a dunghill
and acts like one who speaks with a slurred voice,
on a warm summer afternoon,
before the smile of the dead who become close to him.
Now all at once the tenor
resonates in Pals and contemplates the islands
and I always say, looking at the Tower of Hours:
Faced with these things, one must cry.
Spend the afternoon over the rice fields
from Empordà soaked in water.
It’s late, it’s time to return to Begur
on the bus that will leave us at the square.
Let’s go to the bar and have an aperitif with clams.
well seasoned with lemon and pepper.

— Everything is now and nothing, 1970. —

Poet Joan Vinyolí viewpoint

Viewpoint inaugurated on September 12, 2009, on the occasion of the tribute on the 25th anniversary of his death.

From the 1964 poem Sunt lacrimae rerum
Night falls, the ghostly night.
of the king of Begur who rules the castle,
the night of lighthouses and boats lit up,
from the high starry sky.
Everything spins around like in an amusement park,
but you and I live on the wheel button,
where movement is imperceptible.

— Everything is now and nothing, 1970. —

Stairs on Carrer del Castell

The stairs are part of the recurring symbols in Joan Vinyoli’s poetry, they are a few steps from Cal Pallí, and they already appear in the poem El Callat and also in Realitats, to signify the ascension towards a higher state in the search for mystical and physical union, or in the immersion in the deepest interiority of the self.

From the poem Sunday
When through the pines
freshens the sea of ​​air
and the cups are full
of the solar mead;
when the roses bloom
and the noonday flowers burn
Water flies on the terraces.
Sunday, standing on the stairs,
on the landing of a high silence
rich in the secrets of cells and porticoes,
look over the rooftops
the smooth sea sparkling and knows.
After much struggle, only then
of the incessant battle between the rock
and the fire matures and takes on the flame.
After much struggle, only then,
can the gaze fill and retain
quietly. And the grain ripens in the fields.

— The Silent One, 1956.—

Saint Ramon

Vinyoli used to come there at dusk to contemplate the panorama that follows the entire Empordà coastline to Cape Norfeu, the Medes Islands, and much of its interior: Pals, the rice fields, Sant Feliu de Boada, Peratallada, Torroella de Montgrí, Montgrí and its castle. On the night of Saint Lawrence they would go up to the hermitage to see the shooting stars or “tears of the saint”.

“Yesterday evening, a windy evening (…) the view from Sant Ramon, with clouds in the nearby areas and everything clean, cut out, the burnished colors, each green, each blue, each yellow precise and a final, pale background, where the evening star shone like a diamond, was one of those things that is no longer forgotten.”

(letter to Francesc Gomà and Eulàlia Presas, summer 1954)

From the poem Someone called me
I am nothing more than a tree that moves away from the forest,
Called by a deep sea voice.
Alone, near the sea, I have consecrated my leaves to the winds
from beyond the shore.
My roots no longer know how to sink into the earth and save me
and through the foliage I pick solitude.
That’s why I always wander.
under the silence of the constellations
of these high nights of fabulous wealth.

— The Silent One, 1956.—

Begur Castle

Joan Vinyoli got up early to watch the sunrise: “I get up early and signal the first ray of sun from the castle of Begur” (Postcard to JV Foix). The button of the wheel represents the center where the essence of man is found. Josep Pla had pointed out the castle of Montgrí as the button of the wheel of the Empordà and Vinyoli appropriated the image referring to the two castles, that of Montgrí and that of Begur. The oriental circularity that the poem transmits is as important as the direct experience that is at the origin of the image, enriched by the readings of Friedrich Hölderlin, Martin Heidegger and T. S. Eliot. The street of the Castle is stepped, an image of spiritual ascension.

From the poem Sacrifice
I feel the skin of a stabbed ox
on a very high cliff, opposed by the winds,
helpless among the clouds.
My hands are stained red and purple.
I always say the same thing about going up and going down,
and I always repeat the same thing:
on the wheel button
there is no movement.

— Circles, 1979.—

Can Palli

The first house that the Vinyoli family rented, and where they stayed until 1958. It is an Indian house with a ground floor and two floors, very high ceilings, spacious rooms, and a very rudimentary kitchen and services. In the porticoed gallery on the ground floor there is a cistern. The image of the cistern appears in some poems in El Callat and in Llibre de l’amic, to signify the creative power that is gathered over the years, or that must be refilled once the cistern is dry and empty.

From the poem Epilogue
Let’s sit on a bench.
from the square with acacias. Bells are ringing
Evening. The weather is getting better.
I write on the transparent board.
of the air signs. I have burned a bouquet
of yellow leaves. I have to fill it again
the empty cistern.

— Everything is now and nothing, 1970.—

Begur Artistic Center

Joan Vinyoli, his family and his friends spent their evenings there listening to music and attending film sessions. In September 1956, some of the events of the “week of the wise” were held there, in which Lluís Pericot, Joan Guarro, Carles Riba, Joan Petit, Josep Pedreira and Vinyoli himself participated.

From the poem Postcard to Salvador Clotas
Happy few
Whose heart never wants to die.

— Everything is now and nothing, 1970.—

Campuig House

This was the second house that the Vinyoli family rented to spend the summers from the Guarro – Picart couple, who had divided it into three apartments, two of which they rented to friends. Joan Vinyoli and his family spent their summers in Begur from 1954 to 1978.

From the poem The Burnt One
Clear and free thoughts blow
from the high seas to the clean beaches.
big blue fish were flying wildly to fall all at once. I stopped their nets
of words, and when the day has waned
I will take them baskets to the market.
In the clear night, with scales of spring,
Sunbathed, I will enchant the waves.
Pere Patxei, prepare us a crematorium:
Let’s drink it and change the course of the stars.
Sands of love. Flowing sea. I feel memories.
My dead are approaching on tiptoe.

— In the wee hours, 1981.—

Always Bar

Joan Vinyoli and his friends frequented this emblematic bar in the town. After the publication of the collection Tot és ara i res, they familiarly called it “Tot és ara i res”.

From the poem Everything is now and nothing
I ask if it is not
a great comfort to say the word “rain”
and make it rain for a long time
April morning,
where in the shelter of a leaden wing pregnant with storm
The song of a nightingale rises in a spiral
female, from the thick foliage
that tears and fills with memories
the corners tangled with dahlias.
What garden? What was alone? What barns? What irrigation?
The already dry tree is soaked in these waters
filtered from the origins,
The fallen foliage returns full of many April eyes
and the greenery rises compactly from the ancestral subsoil of rough stone.
Screams that I invent, that no one hears; the dead flow hyperbolically.
Everything is now and nothing.

—Everything is now and nothing, 1970. —