Miquel Bauçà was perhaps the most radical stylist, iconoclast, and visionary in Catalan literature: eschewing publicity, insulting his peers, and writing unclassifiable books

"I was born on the 7th of February in the year 1940, and on the 14th of the same month, twelve years later, mother decided to make me into an orphan. I do not know if this was so as to take revenge or simply because she was moved by an instinct for imitation." -Miquel Bauçà

His collection of novellas, “The Siege in the Room: Three Novellas”, had been recently translated from Catalan to English by Martha Tennent and published by Dalkey Archive Press.

In these three haunting novellas by Catalan literature’s great maverick and recluse, Miquel Bauça, there is a pungent reminder, like a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.
Carrer Marsala, which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya neither of which Bau bothered to accept is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In The Old Man, the narrator observes a strange building where a decrepit prisoner is ritually beaten by a policeman once a week. The Warden details the narrator s own captivity, and his relationship with the woman who keeps him prisoner. In Martha Tennent s haunting translation, reminiscent of a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Miquel Bauça’s work is a pungent reminder of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.
Miquel Bauça (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1940 – Barcelona, 2005), a poet and narrative writer was renowned for his verbal and social radicalism. He received the 1961 Salvat-Papasseit Prize for his work Una bella història (A Beautiful Story), the debut book of a young talent that dazzled the critics. He received other awards for later works, for example the 1974 Vicent Andrés Estellés Prize for Notes i comentaris (Notes and Comments) and the 1985 City of Barcelona Prize for Carrer Marsala (Marsala Street). ??The latter work, his first book in prose, marked a turning point in the critics’ reception of his writing. He had now become a writer of reference for those who wished to find a kind of literature that was committed to an integral idea of the human being and, thenceforth, efforts were made to try to draw him into a system that he always rejected one way or another. Hence, although he received the prestigious Sant Joan (Saint John) Prize for his novel L’estuari (The Estuary) in 1989, he never felt that he was part of the literary milieu of his times. Miquel Bauça also published the fictional work El canvi (The Change, 1997), an innovative collection of writings structured in the form of a dictionary, and Els somnis (Dreams, 2002), amongst other books.
In the last years of his life he removed himself even more from everyday realities but this never prompted him to abandon his writing, an oeuvre which is among the most original and intense to come out of the 1970s literary generation. Miquel Bauça died on 3 January 2005, leaving behind an unclassifiable literary corpus, which has unquestionably expanded the bounds of contemporary Catalan literature.
He was a member of the Association of Catalan Language Writers (AELC).
A Writer Shrouded in Myth
by Julià Guillamon
A few years ago, Jordi Coca wrote that Miquel Bauça was like Greta Garbo. Since Carrer Marsala [Marsala Street] appeared in 1985, a myth began to be built up around Miquel Bauça, based on his strange way of life. Unsociable and furtive, Bauça did not frequent literary circles. It was said that he lived apart from everyone, like a penniless outcast, in a caravan. Some people claimed they had seen him in a street, or in a bar. The veterans told stories about his first days in   Barcelona. Apparently he wrote in one of the porched areas of the Paral.lel, where he had set up his office. He would turn up at the house of one of his writer friends and spend the night there whether they wanted him to or not. Where was Miquel Bauça? Had he gone back to Majorca? Was he living in the Eixample district of Barcelona? Tired of all this rumor-mongering, Coca stood up at a congress of young writers, among which there were fervent admirers and myth-makers, and with the greatest respect, but with absolute firmness, affirmed that Bauça was reproducing the syndrome of the invisible, besieged actress, and that the obscurer aspects of his life were attracting more attention than his literary work, and that one had to be careful, because Bauça was a sick man.
Since then, two very clear positions have existed in regard to Bauça. There are those who think that Bauça is a modern classic and his work, a vital enigma, and those who believe that independently of the strength of his imagination and the power of his language, there is a lack of order and cohesive thought in the work of Bauça. One interpretation does not exclude the other. Bauça is both lucid and obtuse, holy and crazy, a symptom and an excrescence. Empúries has now published his Els estats de la connivència (The States of Connivance) which follows the encyclopaedic format of his most recent books, L’estuari (The Estuary) (1990), El crepuscle encén estels (The Twilight Lights Up Stars) (1992) and El canvi [The Change] (1998). The debate continues. -messmatch.com/