Prudent, long (perhaps too much) and with solvent and abundant testimonies. The documentary Guimerà, the Nobel sense prizes they are three episodes of a little more than half an hour that are uploaded to 3Cat and that were broadcast on Sunday night by the linear station, melted one after the other. The core of the plot is the Nobel nomination that the Academy of Good Letters and the Institute of Catalan Studies (in 1912) presented annually between 1907 and 1923. In total, seventeen occasions, all unsuccessful.
The story begins by recalling an error that was already pointed out in 1972 by the Catalanophile Bertil Maler. According to the biography of Josep Miracle, in 1904 Guimerà was the preferred candidate for the Swedish Academy, but “for reasons of chancellery prestidigitation” he was denied. The Nobel Prize in Literature was won by Frederic Mistral and José Echegaray, curiously the main Spanish translator of Guimerà’s work. A few weeks later, Miracle clarified his mistake, the product of a wrong dating of a photo. From this error comes a lie, which the documentary does not support: the Spanish state stole the Nobel from Guimerà that year.
The actress Àngels Gonyalons, who sang in 1988, is the host of the documentary. A choice that could be debatable, but it solves the task with sobriety. And it is she who takes the viewer to Stockholm to consult the archives of the Nobel committee. This is documentation already worked on by professors Enric Gallén and Dan Nosell (philologist at the University of Uppsala) who published a book in 2011 on the matter. Both participate in the program. Guimerà, Nobel sense awards it explains things well, even though they are known, at least in restricted academic areas that the work of Pep Antoni Roig and Jordi Escofet, its directors, transfers to a larger audience. A good review lesson.
The fact that Guimerà did not receive the Nobel has different explanations. One, the most permanent, is that its academic support was weak. The Academy of Good Letters could not compete with institutions better connected to the international circuit. Certainly, the RAE never bet on Guimerà, but Roig rules out that there was a dirty war by the Spanish state. “We didn’t want to play the game of conspiracies because we didn’t find any”, he said to theWe buy. Since the First World War was declared, the Nobel committee has been particularly reluctant to reward literature associated with non-hegemonic nationalisms, introducing geopolitical criteria into its decisions. Guimerà stood out politically as a radical Catalanist. And in the twenties, Guimerà was no longer so effective.
Aside from this matter and without pretending to be an exhaustive biography of the writer, the documentary makes excursions into other aspects of his life. The film talks about Guimerà’s homosexuality without giving too many details and mentioning a female figure, an alleged youthful love of El Vendrell, which can cloud the viewer’s understanding. Xavier Albertí and Albert Arribas (Guimerà, symbolic man2016) delved into the “hidden sexuality” of Guimerà, who never spoke about his condition. A silence that theater people traced in the playwright’s characters. “Dark sex, sadism, inversion of active and passive roles in the couple… The worldwide success enjoyed by Àngel Guimerà was no accident. This ambitious character (…) was not the stereotypical lickspittle that they have been trying to sell us for so long”, wrote Josep Maria Benet i Jornet. Guimerà is buried, as the documentary shows, together with the Catalan patrician Pere Aldavert.
Born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife to a Catalan father and a Canarian mother, Agustí Guimerà did not recognize his two children until the family settled in Barcelona and the marriage regularized their situation with a wedding in 1854. The documentary travels to Tenerife to meet a nice bunch of relatives and a theater director. The conversation, however, is not very profitable. It is clear, of course, that they all consider him a Catalanist, a separatist. The documentary, serious, without unnecessary revelries, was seen by 180,000 viewers (11.8% of the screen share).
Guimerà was not the only writer in Catalan proposed for the Nobel Prize in Literature. There has been more than one campaign. The Parliament requested it for Miquel Martí and Pol; the North American Catalan Society, for Foix; the Pen Club of Catalonia, for Espriu. There are the cases of Carner, Porcel… And nothing at all. In general, these proposals are made to honor the author, but also and mainly, looking to find a powerful speaker for culture in Catalan.
