The last day I saw Josep Maria Espinas It was a few summers ago in the Almadraba-Park, the hotel of the Subirós-Mercader family. I was walking through the garden, a splendid viewpoint, a proud balcony in front of the bay of Roses, and informed me and a friend that he was writing his biography. “I do it in decasyllables,” he told us. He added that it was the most natural way she had found to block everything that would have come out of his typewriter, a blue Olivetti, pulling to ashes, if he had chosen not to have limits. In fact, he had them, and above all one that was the touchstone of his literature prevailed: “Is it necessary? Should you always ask yourself this when you write? & rdquor ;. He did not say it in reference to a hypothetical self-censorship, but as a poetic treatise. Is it necessary to write it in a bombastic style or with an excess of adjectives? Is it necessary to expand the imagination without having our feet on the ground, in the well understood that “ground”, here, means syntax, means control of the instrument of the language?
We saw him write on the terrace of the room, which overlooked the sea. Later, they had dinner, he, his wife Lina and their daughter Olga, and, discreetly, they went outside for after-dinner. I liked that he repeated to me, out loud, what he had already told many times. When in 1976, Josep Faulí He proposed to collaborate in ‘Avui’ with a fortnightly or monthly article, he replied that it was too much work, that, at most, he could write one a day. So it was, for more than four decades, more than eleven thousand pieces, viewpoints, or “small observatories & rdquor ;, What was the name of the section that he did for EL PERIODICO over the course of twenty years? It was a privilege, a deep satisfaction, to be able to share pages with the teacher, because Espinàs represents the very essence of what we try to configure on a daily basis. Observe, look, be attentive, try to distill everything that comes to you, that excites you, that makes you angry or applaud, or that simply passes before your eyes. And try to explain it in a language agile and discreet, without excessive sentimentality, with the right measure of things, and aware that doing it every day is more the work of a craftsman (with evanescent material) rather than the bursting outburst of an artist. At most, one every day, because it is in the periodicity, in the constancy, where the secret of this trade is hidden. This is what Espinàs taught us.