He has been one of the finest and most concrete lullists. The wise Anthony Bonner (New York, 1928), translator, musicologist at Harvard and Paris, botanist and environmental activist, died in Palma, aged 97, this Monday, the 8th. Bonner, with his family, settled in Mallorca in 1954 and in the United States he published – among others – a key work Selected works of Ramon Lull 1985 and in Catalan to publishing house Moll, 1989). With the specialist of Catalonia Lola Badia, he will prepare Ramon Llull, life, thought and literary work.
Affable and discreet, he found manuscripts and certain works of , those attributed and found out many false authors, apocrypha. Do dozens of specialized publications and above all with sympathy and a calm speech, temper a canon, avoid some tangled or mythologized nonsense. He remembered that he was not a believer but that he was interested in those who were. The Bonner stamp accredits enough contemporary editions of the central titles and directs current views on the medieval sage.
Bonner arrived in Mallorca to spend a summer and ended up being, over the years, part responsible for the great new configuration of Llull’s 260 manuscripts, that is the immense corpus, the . Everything is within reach, everywhere. To save his work as a transcriber, editor and translator at the beginning of home computing, he set up a contraption in front of his work table to be able to see the different written media.
From Llull’s own handwriting we know “two small dedications, in his hand, in Latin: one by the Dukes of Venice, and another manuscript signed by the Carthusians of Paris, in a curious document. It is a piece of work, not clean, full of corrections”, as he once detailed in EL PAÍS.
Ramon Llull, flag bearer of the Catalan language and culture (Mallorca 1232-1316) was a central occupation of the extinct North American who managed his contemporary leap to the United States. And once he warned about the attempted clandestine sale from Mallorca of a book by Llull to the Biblioteca de Catalunya, a manuscript that had been stolen or lost from the Lul·liana Archaeological Society of Palma. He also translated François Villon, Jules Verne, Balzac, Borges, Diderot, Gérard de Nerval among others. He signed two novels in English.
He was also the author of central manuals on Plants in the Balearic IslandsBonner loved jazz and was a musician in the Camerata Barroca de Puigpunyent, the town where he also lived as a first foreigner. There he learned his Catalan with the stonemasons of his old house. Above all, he was a respected environmental activist, president and founder of the Balearic Ornithology Group (GOB) and was awarded the Cross of Sant Jordi, the Llull prize, the honorary doctorate of the University of the Balearic Islands, Barcelona and Friburg.
Bonner took part in a documentary that Manuel Huerga and Jaume Roures made about it (2018), which is an interpretation by the painter – a friend of Bonner and his family – of part of Llull’s central work for an exhibition in the stained glass windows of the National Library of Paris and the Picasso museum.
“I love to travel to the 13th and 14th centuries and try to get into the skin of another person. If it’s Ramon Llull, very well, even a scribe. When I look, edit a manuscript I say to myself, and now why did he put that?”, he explained in , in 2007. The Bonner lineage came from American bankers and industrialists on the island opened firm branches: His wife Eva Eisenberg was also a translator and took charge of Book of the Friend and Beloved from Llull as well; his daughter Deborah is a translator, for example of . Aina is an illustrator (of her father’s plant book and author at National Geographic where she is Hannah) and David is a computer engineer in the aeronautical industry in France.
