“Mistress of thought, / divine Melancholy!” sang Clementina Arderiu, who lived from 1889 to 1976; her family were jewelers and had a shop on Carrer Avinyó, but she didn’t want to be a shopkeeper, she had the soul of an artist: the young poet (1893-1959) courted her and ended up marrying her in 1916. She was a few years that she had started to publish in magazines and in some anthologies. The same 1916 brings out the first book, Songs and elegies. Already in 1917, Clementina Arderiu praises her, like her man and like more than four authors of her time, she is Catholic, believer and practitioner: this ideology or idea or, as she says, this faith, in principle, as she presents it, I am not disgusted: during the Spanish war he made a prayer (“Prayer in the war”) that we could subscribe to: “Forgiveness/ for the victories,/ for the defeats,/ for the battles/ forgive me,/ Lord!// I am not frightened/ by Death:/ to live scares me./ Forgive me,/ Lord.// The world you made/ does not satisfy you,/ and now you would like it/ better,/ Lord ?”… Maybe only in the last book, Hope, stillfrom when he is already 80 years old, he recovers a few poems that can be considered beatitudes.
she was the poet’s godmother, which means that she accompanied him when he was baptized, and then, when her grandson was seven or eight years old and they had him make his first communion, she dedicated or offered him a poem, “Ofrena”, in which he sees it as a branch, as a sprout, of the “trunk that binds us”, which can be the family in a broad sense or, more specifically, it can be the trunk of poetry that comes from grandfather Carles and that comes from Grandma Clementina and that will continue with the poet-singer Pau: she who had baptized him, now when he gives communion says: “Lord, I offer him to you again,/ we have polished him like a star./ That of the baptism candle/ in the small light and fine/ I already saw him as I see him now,/ Lord, that I am his godmother:/ like a custard of our longing/ and a knot in the trunk that binds us:/ return it all to us Love,/ done all of it Love and Spike”. Now we know that the prophecy has been fulfilled, and even more if we see this Spike full of grain, food, for all of us. In his own way, Pau Riba responded, lovingly, by composing and singing five Clementine poems, on side A of the disc From Riba to Riba (on side B there are poems by grandfather Carles), accompanied by the Taller de Músics ensemble led by Xavier Maristany and with Quico Samsó on drums. One of the songs I like best, from the album, is the “Cançó del dia inútil”: the blues music with which Pau Riba sings it fits perfectly with the futility of the useless day: “Aquest dia que fina, que fina/ slowly , like the lamp in the vase,/ it does not bring me divine joy,/ you do not even pay attention to me”. In the second stanza, with a beautiful play of consonants, Clementina Arderiu dares to paint it like this: “He left me in the crying room/ like a useless and old armchair,/ among the furniture that surrounds me/ and the flies that seek my skin”.
One of Arderiu’s poems sung by Pau Riba is the “Cançó del risc” (which is part of a section called “Sentiment d’exili”): “If I live I don’t live./ The love of risk,/ com m’abellia!”, where this “if I live I don’t live” at the outset should not be understood as the mystical thing of “as I live, therefore I don’t live” – that of “muero porque no muero”—, but in the Catalan sense of “si cau no cau”, of being about to live and not living, which is a construction, or situation, that Clementina Arderiu really likes: in her verses we find, now with a comma and now without: “if you dare, if you don’t dare”, “if he will come, if he won’t come”, “now you cry, now you laugh”, “if you ate, if you didn’t eat”, “if you had to, you wouldn’t have to” , “if you dare, if you don’t bitches”… In the “Song of risk” the expression appears five times without a comma and once with a comma, as if the first five times he lived in this risk of living or not, and in the other he already thought that this life would indeed it is not living
In the poem “Of freedom” the title goes without questions, as seen in the Magazine of Catalonia number 95 (Paris, 1940): she sees herself, as a teenager, running, and this vision “of freedom is a print/ engraved deep in the heart”, and it is beautiful.
In the dictionary in ten volumes of , among the derivatives of tremolar there is the adjective tremoladís, and to illustrate it he quotes a piece of a poem by Clementina Arderiu, “the heroic and masterful companion of teacher Carles Riba”, when fact is an adjective used by many authors, starting with Carles Riba himself in theOdysseyand also Sagarra, Bartra, Liost, etc. But Coromines prefers to quote Arderiu; first, because the poem is called “Exile” and it deals with this, and among other things it represents longing with the image of a palm tree from Barcelona and home: palm tree/ (…) Swing, palm tree,/ the subtle air!”; and, secondly, because I imagine that Coromines knew her, and knew of the heroic character of the woman who went into exile in France with an adult and three teenagers (two sons and a daughter) and wanted to leave her testimony and praise . Wisteria, pine, fig tree, palm tree, viola trees from her home: she claims to be from Barcelona, since her exile, and places the memory explicitly in Sarrià, where they lived before fleeing to France. When they got married, they first rented a small house up on the hill of Putget (and not Putxet, as the barbaric nomenclature of Barcelona writes it); then they moved to a house in Sarrià and, after the years of exile, they came to a flat on Avenida República Argentina, in front of the Vallcarca bridge.
Clementina Arderiu is a strong woman who is not afraid, either, to show moments of weakness (“But I see in the black shadow/ how my desire failed me:/ mea culpa that I would like/ to display on my chest./ I no longer they will say strong woman/ -I don’t think so myself”). But right from the start, in the first book, in the poem “Prefiguring” (which, like so many of his poems, has an air of song), it had already been defined as follows: “I am no longer the young maiden / who searches for the plug / to make – it’s warm;/ I’m the woman who feels all strong/ at the door/ and watches and smiles”.
