History and legend
As paradisiacal as it is, the region has known many battles and the one that shook it during the Second Punic War, in 217 BC, was not the least violent. This victory of the Roman Cnaeus Scipio resulted in the capture of 25 ships and the conquest of the Balearic Islands, and was recounted by Polybius, a prolific historian whose texts have unfortunately been lost, and later by his successor, Titus Livius, author of Ab Urbe condita libri (Roman History from its foundation) in the first century BC. Much later, at the very beginning of the 19th century, Tarragona was the setting for the siege that the French supported from May 4, 1811... until the city surrendered on June 28, 1811. If Marshal Suchet's army lost 4,000 men, more than 15,000 natives, including many civilians, lost their lives in these tragic circumstances. This inspired Honoré de Balzac to write the sad image of a " Tarragona raped, with her hair spread and half-naked " in his short story La Marana, which was published in episodes in La Revue de Paris in the early 1930s and later in La Comédie humaine in 1846. Finally, the Spanish Civil War did not spare the territory: the last Republican offensive took place there from July 25 to November 16, 1938. This episode, also known as the Battle of the Ebro, served as the backdrop for the novel The Monarch of Shadows
(Actes Sud) by Javier Cercas, a famous contemporary writer. But the memory of men is not only based on historical facts, it is also made up of tales that are transmitted through oral tradition, until some people collect them and put them in writing, as Joan Amades did at the beginning of the 20th century. Born in 1890 in Barcelona, where he died in 1959, this ethnologist became fascinated by folklore, which he was worried would disappear. He devoted new works to traditions, costumes, dances and songs, but also to legends, especially the one about the fight of Saint George against the dragon, which he placed in front of the walls of Montblanc. This small medieval town, located inland from Tarragona, does not fail to celebrate this recognition every year with a festive week. It must be said that St. George is not just anyone in Spain, since, if he is known as Sant Jordi, he is also the patron saint of Catalonia. Since the Middle Ages, it has been customary to offer a rose on the day he is celebrated, but - by chance of the calendar - this April 23 also saw the death of Cervantes in 1616. In 1926, a publisher chose this date to pay tribute to booksellers, a choice that UNESCO endorsed in 1995 by initiating the World Book and Copyright Day. Although it is now appropriate to give flowers and novels on April 23, this date remains one of the symbols of Catalan identity, especially since the Renaixença. This movement was dedicated to highlighting the culture of Catalonia and especially its language, finally giving it literary qualities. It emerged in 1833, encouraged by the rise of Romanticism, one of whose precursors, Manuel de Cabanyes y Ballester, lost his life that same year at the age of 25.A strong identity
The attachment to Catalan is certainly what unites the authors of the Costa Daurada and the lands of the Ebro, starting with the art critic and philosopher Eugenio d'Ors (1881-1954), who was born in Barcelona but died in Vilanova i la Geltrú, the town where Enric Martí i Muntaner was born in 1889. Both participated in the magazine La Veu de Catalunya, and the latter - having left Spain for Argentina at a very young age - translated the poets of his adopted country into his language and published a collection of anti-fascist poems, Passen els bàrbars, in 1938. Josep Maria Casas i de Muller (1890-1975) from Tarragona is associated with the Noucentisme that appeared in Catalonia with the new century. Although he was rather well versed in mathematics, he stood out in the numerous Jeux Floraux (poetic jousts) in which he participated, and published several anthologies(Libre de versos in 1922, Fra Garí in 1927). The Franco period forced him to give up Catalan in favor of Spanish, a terrible choice that Sebastià Juan Arbó (1902-1984) found difficult to make. He stopped publishing between 1936, the year in which his great success Terres de l'Ebre was published, and 1948, when Sobre las piedras grises won him the Nadal Prize despite his sacrifice
Artur Bladé i Desumvila (1907-1995) chose the path of exile, moving to Mexico in 1961, where he worked as a journalist and began his work as a writer. His work, which includes diaries, historical chronicles and descriptions of life in the Benissanet region, earned him the Sant Jordi Cross in 1984, an award he shared with Jesús Moncada i Estruga (1941-2005), who received it in 2001. The latter also received the Serra d'Or Critics' Prize in 1989 for Camí de Sirga (translated by the Seuil publishing house in 1992, but Les Bateliers de l'Ebre is now out of print), a polyphonic novel that depicts a village destined to be swallowed up by the waters following the construction of a dam, and is inspired by the author's native town of Mequinenza, located between the Segre and the Ebre. In French, however, it is still possible to discover this author, either with Frémissante mémoire (Gallimard) based on a news item from 1877, or with Anthologie de contes proposed by the publisher Trabucaire
Oriol Pi de Cabanyes i Almirall and Vicent Pellicer i Ollés, born in 1950 and 1956 respectively in Villanova i la Geltrú and Valdealgorfa, also contribute to promoting Catalan culture. The former has been director of the Víctor Balaguer Museum, has made a name for himself as a journalist and has published novels and essays, while the latter has favored the short story format but has also distinguished himself as a photographer and lecturer. Finally, Jorge Carrión, born in Tarragona in 1976, enjoys an international reputation, both for his novels(Those of the Future, the first volume of his New Century Trilogy, was translated by Seuil in 2017) and for his literary essays(Booksellers: Itineraries of a Passion, 2016, Seuil and Against Amazon, 2020, The New Attila)
