Roots..
From west to east, from Ciutadella, where witches secretly officiate, to Maó, where ghosts relentlessly haunt the Château de Saint-Philippe, Menorca is home to a whole corpus of legends, including the memory of its famous shipwrecks and the myth of its sunken cities. In 1990, Carlos Garrido Torres took an interest in this ancestral heritage and published Menorca Màgica, a work that became a bestseller, but which we are not yet able to discover in our own language. Long after the giant who first inhabited the island is said to have abandoned it, Menorca remained fertile ground for the imagination, even if reality eventually caught up with it. For example, French writer and playwright Pierre-Nicolas Brunet (1733-1771) candidly confessed to mixing narrative and fiction in Minorque conquise, which he published in 1756. This "poëme héroïque, en quatre chants" is a delightful read for anyone with a taste for the language of yesteryear, and can be downloaded free of charge from Gallica, the BNF website. It's worth mentioning that it tells of a memorable siege and a British admiral, John Byng. Joan Ramis i Ramis (1746-1819) wanted to be more precise. The titles of his many opuses - Resumen topográfico e histórico de Menorca, Alquerías de Menorca, Varones ilustres de Menorca, Antigüedades célticas de Menorca... - demonstrate his natural rigor and curiosity. That said, he sometimes abandoned the sciences to devote himself to poetry and theater, which was hardly surprising for a man who was both a lawyer and one of the founders, in 1778, of the Societat Maonesa de Cultura. A great capacity for adaptation that certainly served him well in his day-to-day life, as the upheavals that shook his native island during the 18th century brought him face to face with different languages and cultures - French, English, Catalan and Spanish..
This question of linguistics - and, more broadly, of identity - was also to agitate his friend Antoni Febrer i Cardona, 15 years his junior, who with him created the Societat Maonesa de Cultura and joined the Grup Il-lustrat Menorquí. Febrer - who was born under French rule, lived through the British occupation and saw the arrival of the Spanish - first studied law in Avignon, before devoting himself fully to literature, becoming a translator (from Latin into Catalan), author of a Principis de la lectura menorquina discovered after his death, and above all a grammarian. His studies on the Minorcan dialect - derived from the Catalan language, but with its own specific characteristics - are still highly prized, as is his impressive Minorcan-Spanish-French-Latin Dictionary. Just a century and a year later, on the neighboring island of Mallorca, in Manacor to be precise, Antoni Maria Alcover was born in 1862. He set about collecting Mallorcan vocabulary, and the following year inaugurated Spain's first philological journal. This project was to become the Catalan-Valencian-Balearic Dictionary, to which he actively contributed and edited until his death in 1932, when he was succeeded by Francesc de Borja Moll (1903-1991) from Menorca. The first volume of this colossal ten-volume work was published in 1926, the last only in 1962, the Franco dictatorship having in the meantime put a stop to such initiatives..
... to writing
Vicar and Latin teacher Antoni Moll Camps (1926-2023) was crowned "Patriarca de les lletres menorquines" with Serenor (1947), the first Catalan-language work to appear after the end of the civil war, one of the last battles of which was fought on the island. In 1966, he emigrated to Chile, left the church to marry four years later, and only resumed publishing in 1986 with Inventari de minyonia, written in prose. Pau Faner i Coll, born in Ciutadella in 1949, also served as a link between the two continents, as he is credited with introducing the typically Latin American literary movement, Magic Realism, into Catalan literature. His novels, for young and old, and his short stories, including those inspired by Menorca, which were his first published work in 1972, have won him prestigious awards (Premi Josep Pla de narrativa in 1983, Premi Nadal de novel in 1985...) and made him one of his island's most famous writers.
However, it was the authors born in the second half of the 20th century who confirmed the effervescence of Menorcan literature. Even if the absence of translations doesn't let us imagine it, they are indeed numerous, publishing and enlivening the island's cultural life. Josep Maria Quintana Petrus' involvement with various institutions was intense, and his eclectic work was recognized with numerous awards. Joan F. López Casasnovas (1952-2022) co-founded theInstitut Menorquí d'Estudis. A professor of languages and literature, he wrote numerous articles on linguistics under his own name, reserving his pseudonym Pere Xerxa for his poetic verses. Self-taught but the son of a poet, Pere Gomilla, born in Alaior in 1954, has a taste for the stage and performance: between 1977 and 1979, he took part in the artistic group Es Mussols, and since 2004 has organized the Illanvers festival. He has also published regularly since 1978(Regió afòtica) and contributed to magazines such as S'Ull de Sol and Menorca. Josefina Salord Ripoll also began her career in newspapers, before tackling more substantial works(Diccionari del teatre a les Illes Balears, Diccionari de la literatura catalana), all the while being very active in theAteneu de Maó and the Cercle Artístic de Ciutadella. We should also mention poet Ponç Pons, widely acclaimed for his multi-faceted work, and Bel Joan Casasnovas, who made a name for herself in 1991 at the Biennal Literària de poesia de Sant Joan, and their female counterparts, novelists Esperança Camps and Maite Salord Ripoll. Last but not least, the next generation of poets appears to be assured thanks to Lucia Palliser, who is particularly involved in organizing Menorca's slam festival, and Guillem Benejam, born in 1990, who has already won several prizes and is also very involved in a number of literary events.
