Lecturer from the Faculty of Humanities at UIC Barcelona and coordinator of the Carlos Pujol, Literature and Humanism Research Group (2017 SGR 383), Dr Teresa Vallès, has published Escribir a contracorriente.Fuentes para el estudio del pensamiento literario de Carlos Pujol, (Writing against the grain. Sources for studying Carlos Pujol’s literary thought), a book of unpublished texts that disclose the literary thought of the Barcelona-born poet, novelist, translator and essayist.
The book contains letters and interviews in which Pujol openly exhibits his way of understanding and practising literature, such as the unpublished talk “Carta a unos jóvenes poetas” (A letter to young poets). The book presents a compilation of twenty-five interviews with the writer over the course of his literary career, as well as more than seventy letters to his friend Miguel Ángel del Arco over the period in which he was revising his memoirs as a judge, resulting in an improvised yet incredibly rich style guide. The documents have been gathered from the Carlos Pujol Personal Archive at UIC Barcelona, established thanks to the donation made to the writer’s personal archive.
Carlos Pujol’s aphorism “writing against the grain” attests to the author’s desire to preserve his creative identity and freedom by remaining at the margins of literary fashions, trends and movements, as well as advocating a style that aspires to be classic, which –he warned– does not mean old, but rather insusceptible to time and its fashions.
The book includes a prologue from Domingo Ródenas, professor at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra, and an introductory study “Aproximación al pensamiento literario de Carlos Pujol” (Approaching the literary thought of Carlos Pujol) by Dr Vallès. It also features a prognostic index and a chronology of the author’s biography.
About Carlos Pujol
Carlos Pujol (Barcelona, 1936-2012) was one of the wisest belletrists of his time, but also one of the most discreet; a veritable silent giant. His publications as a writer, critic and translator constitute an organic compilation that feeds from his familiarity with European literary tradition. Known for his extensive and highly credible literary career, he is the author of some fifty books on poetry, novels, short stories and aphorisms, as well as biographies, essays and articles on literary criticism.
He translated around one hundred books by some of the best writers of all time, with exemplary Spanish versions of French –Ronsard, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Corbière, Samain, Francis Jammes– and English poetry –John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Dickinson, Hopkins, Stevenson–. He also translated works by Racine, Voltaire, Joubert, Stendhal, Balzac, Proust and Simenon, as well as Shakespeare, Defoe, Jane Austen, Henry James and Hemingway.
He was happily married to Marta Lagarriga and had four children and seventeen grandchildren.
About Teresa Vallès
Teresa Vallès Botey holds a doctoral degree from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), a master’s degree in cognitive sciences and language from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a bachelor’s degree in Catalan language and literature from the University of Barcelona (UB). She received an Extraordinary Doctoral Award from the UPF and was a visiting lecturer at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and Leiden University (The Netherlands). She currently teaches Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Humanities at UIC Barcelona, as well as directing the Carlos Pujol, Literature and Humanism Research Group (2017 SGR 383) and managing the Carlos Pujol Personal Archive. She has organised academic conferences and coordinated the republication of some of Pujol’s novels. She has published articles in journals such as Ínsula, Revista de Occidente, Signa, Revista Chilena de Literatura, Hispanic Research Journal and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies.
