Dolors Miquel

Dolors Miquel I Abellà
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Born	18 July 1960 Lleida, Catalonia, Spain
Occupation	Writer and poet

Dolors Miquel i Abellà (born in Lleida, 18 July, 1960) is a Catalan poet. After a youthful burst of literary activity, she made her mark on the Catalan public scene in the second half of the 1990s. Since then, apart from periods when she deliberately absented herself from the public sphere, she has published books, written articles for the press and given public performances, participated in round tables and other cultural acts. In 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, she declared she would publish no more books of poetry and change her name to Lola Miquel, although she was intending to publish other texts and texts for the theatre.

Biography

She was born into a middle-class family in the municipality of Balàfia in Lleida. At the age of three she was taken to study with a teacher by the name of Senyora Maria, who lived in a flat over where her grandparents lived and taught her to speak Spanish, a language with which she was quite unfamiliar, as well as to add, take away, multiply, divide, read and write. She continued her education in a convent school in Lestonnac, from which she was expelled because of her bolshie attitudes. She then studied in a secondary school on the road to Zaragoza on the outskirts of Lleida. She began to read for a degree in Spanish literature in the same city. She was the driving force behind the literary magazine La Higiènica that was her idea and that scandalised post-Franco society in Lleida and was finally confiscated from the bookshops by a Civil Guard patrol that entered the faculty in Roser. The following year she fled the conservatism of small cities and went to Barcelona to study the fourth year in a degree in Catalan Literature. Once she finished her degree, she qualified to teach Catalan literature and did so in several secondary schools in Tarragona, Girona and Barcelona until she left teaching in 1999. Despite living far from the city where many of her family died away before the turn of the century she still had friends there, and returned from time to time and published many of her poems in local journals. Her first collection of poetry came out around 1990. But it wasn’t until 1996, once separated from her first husband, that she combined writing poetry with public performance, thanks to her friendship with Enric Casasses. With him and other poets, like Pau Riba, Josep Pedrals or Gerard Horta and encouraged by the organiser Víctor Nick, she joined in a week-long tour of a number of Catalan cities and towns. This was the start of her participation in Catalan cultural life as a poet and performer.

In 2016, almost forty years after the ‘case’ of La Higiènica, history repeated itself. In February 2016 a polemic was generated by a reading Dolors Miquel gave during the awards ceremony of the City of Barcelona Prizes in the Saló de Cent at the Town Hall. The reading of her poem ‘Mare Nostra’ – a feminist re-writing of ‘Our Father’ written two years before for the prize-winning collection Missa pagesa (Peasant Mass)– was greeted with huge ovations from the audience in the room. However, Alberto Fernández Díaz, leader of the conservative Popular Party on the Town Council, abandoned the ceremony in protest at a reading he considered to be sacrilegious. It was an act that would create a huge public polemic across the Catalan and Spanish media and even reached South America. It later generated further polemics when she said that she had been obliged/persuaded to read the ‘Mare nostra’ poem and blamed the way she’d been manipulated by those who hired the prize ceremony venue from the Town Hall and Mayor Ada Colau: namely, Magda Puyo and her husband. She added later that she had been manipulated by a deputy mayor who was responsible for the event and by the mayor herself. This was denied by those who programmed the event. The Díaz brothers and the Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers accused Dolors Miquel and Mayor Ada Colao of committing ‘a crime against religious feelings’. The writer received lots of support but also many threats. On 2 February 2017, the Supreme Court in Barcelona resolved the case by saying that what happened fell within the purview of an exercise of freedom of expression and that it had failed to find evidence of any intention to cause insult to anyone.

Work

The beginnings

The first poems by Dolors Miquel appeared in the magazine La Higiènica. There is talk of a lost book written in 1980 that was entered for the 1981 Miquel de Palol Prize in Girona, and was runner-up. Dolors Ollé, a member of the jury, expressed an interest in publishing the book but the author didn’t want to proceed, we don’t know why. In subsequent years she won a couple of minor prizes. One of them, with a book, entitled Boris, Lluna i Jo (Boris, Moon and I) that she entered under the name of her first husband, who went to collect the prize as if the book was his. It wasn’t until El vent i la casa tancada (The wind and the Closed House) that won the Rosa Leveroni Prize (1989) that she published her first book of poems as a writer with Columna. She also published a book of fiction with the same publishers in 1992: Maruja Reyes sóc jo (I am Maruja Reyes). A problem arose when Dolors Miquel wrote a book of sonnets in a highly baroque style, a book the author decided shouldn’t see the light of day, something that really upset her publisher at Columna, which led Dolors Miquel to distance herself from them and explore other ways of making it into print. In that respect her friendships with Flàvia Company and Enric Casasses were crucial.

1998-2011

This phase begins with the publication of El Llibre dels homes (The Book of Men) in 1998 by Xavier Folch, at the then very prestigious Editorial Empúries. Written in four-syllable couplets, mixing sarcasm and attitude, El Llibre dels Homes found its literary inspiration in the fifteenth-century L’Espill o Llibre de les dones (The Mirror or the Book of Women) by Jaume Roig. It draws a dark-grey portrait of the era from the death of Franco to the advent of Aznar’s right-wing government, which was at the root of the disillusion of so many young women who joined the revolution for Catalonia, freedom, amnesty, democracy but which was provoked in particular by their male comrades in the struggle, who had enacted no revolution at all in their personal relationships and continued to treat them as their fathers had treated their mothers. The book was a great success. By the time the book came out, Dolors had already given many readings throughout Catalonia (and sporadically on the Balearic Islands too) accompanied by Enric Casasses, Gerard Horta, Josep Pedrals, Eduard Escofet and in parallel with Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay. At the time the two groups were taking poetry everywhere.

This was followed by a slim book in 1999 published by Edicions Arola and Magí Sunyer, in collaboration with the photographer, Vanessa Pey. The book, entitled Transgredior, (I transgress), combines techniques of writing for the theatre and poetry. The central themes focus on a critique and analysis of the patriarchal structure of the couple, a structure based on romantic love, a male chauvinist cultural creation. That same year, Editorial Empúries, Miquel’s publisher from 1998, brought out Haikus del camioner (Truck Driver Haikus) where the themes centre on a man’s solitary journey through life, a journey through the outskirts of cities, along roads at night, across human sadness and solitude, all in the course of a book of haikus linked together by a truck driver driving towards his destiny across those god-forsaken worlds. The book has two epilogues, by Orlando Guillén and Enric Casasses respectively. It was launched in Barcelona together with the book Jordi Pope, in the London Bar, with the presence of Xavier Folch. In 2019, the American Clyde Moneyhun translated the book into English with the title Truck Driver Haikus.

The following year the Girona publishers Llibres del Segle of activist Manuel Costa-Pau, based in Gaüses, published Gitana Roc (2000) (Gypsy Rock), with drawings by Víctor Nick. The book was launched in the Llibreria 22 bookshop in Girona by Ponç Puigdevall, who wrote in an El País article that same year: ‘The author uses love as a pretext to speak of pain in a world full of threats and fear. However, although the central poem in Gitana Roc, “El carrer de els transformacions” has a clearly narrative intention, what really hits the reader is the continual shift in scenarios, the impossibility of representing time conventionally, the persistent metamorphosis of voices in the different sections, that are brilliantly transformed with great tenderness and verbal agility.

Gitana Roc was followed by Mos de Gat (Cat-bite) in 2002, a book that combined conventional metric forms with free verse and focused on passionate love, seen as delirium, mental waywardness and momentary madness, that addicts humans like a drug and that humans seek out as a drug. In 2002, Dolors Miquel also brought out the magazine La Verge Peluda, (The Hairy Virgin), of which she’d published half an issue in 1996; it is a kind of cardboard folding pamphlet she created in collaboration with Anna Figueres from Tarragona. The magazine edited, created, made and paid for by Miquel herself, was much in demand from bookshops in Catalonia and the Islands. Apart from making various poetic texts available, it also had the explicit intention of forging a critical vision of the literary world, especially in that those who were interviewed or voiced their ideas are women and not men, as was the case in all other Catalan magazines at the time. The magazine empowered the female voice.

In 2003, making the most of the skills she had developed editing the magazine, she published with the Vic publisher, Jaume Auladell, Ambcapell, playing with the two meanings of ‘without male characters’ and ‘hatless’; she created a number of collages that appear in the book, which also has her first publication with troubadour roots, Escolteu, (Hear) based on a poem by the troubadour Marcabrús.

Two years later, in 2004, Dolors Miquel brought out two books. One is entirely written in the Lleida dialect of Catalan and heptasyllabic quatrains, in a kind of encyclopaedia of popular wisdom, that gathers together Lleida thought from a past era, the era of those who are now dead, and does so with a hilarious use of irony and humour. This is Ver7s de la Terra, (Ver7se of the Earth) with a cover by Perejaume. The other book was again published by Empúries. It is entitled Aioç, a word from the chronicles of Jaume I, and as A. M. Espadaler points out ‘using sailors’ vocabulary, and not only in Catalan but also Galician (...) Aioç means God: it is a Greek word... But, careful!, God’s name is transformed into a reprimand. And a reprimand, in the Mediterranean, transformed into a word of strength when it is time to lift anchors or unfurl a vessel’s rigging. The book, which again combines formal or popular rhyming with free verse was awarded the 2005 City of Barcelona Prize for poetry.

In 2006 Missa Pagesa was published, thanks to the Gabriel Ferrater Prize awared in Sant Cugat del Vallès. The book follows the structure of the Catholic Mass. Enric Casasses wrote: ‘The great poetic innovation of the year, in fact, of the last few years is Missa pagesa by Dolors Miquel, otherwise known as ‘Headbanger and Headache, Countess of Balàfia, amnesiac baroness of the Pill’s rope and executor of the squaring of the circle’, who brings us energy and nourishment in the midst of the inanity of the vacuum that reigns. This is no pseudo-psychological confession for frenzied tourists, it is the real thing and open to everyone. The insights and harmonies of today’s beauty and ugliness configured thanks to her brilliant imagination, in a higher form of artistic harmony that is incisive and even ‘too human’. The Teatre Kaddish, directed by Xavier Giménez Casas gave several dramatic performances of the book in 2012 and 2013. The Mexican poet Orlando Guillén translated it into Spanish with the title of Misa Payesa, in 2016. Clyde Moneyhun translated it into English.

El 2007, the chap-book, El Soc (The Clog) was published in Lleida by Carles Sanuy. El Soc, is Dolors Miquel’s poetic response to a poem sent to her by Josep Pedrals.

In 2009 the same Lleida publisher brought out another book by Dolors Miquel: El Musot. (The Snout). It is a collection of sonnets, some canonical, others innovating the structure 4+6, counting diphthongs and even accents as four syllables. The book additionally incorporates archaic words, inserting them in contexts where their old meanings only becomes clear from the surrounding words. It is also a book that was written intentionally so it can’t be translated into another language. The themes focus on social stereotypes and patriarchal myths, read in reverse and thus destroyed, like the myths of Don Juan or Dracula.

Two books were published in 2010, both published by Jordi Cornudella, who edited her work from Missa pagesa onwards. One is an anthology of medieval Catalan poetry translated into modern Catalan, with over two hundred poems with a variety of themes, entitled, Cap Home és visible, (No man is visible) a quote from Ramon Llull. The other, La Dona que mirava la tele, (The Woman who watched the telly’) a poème-fleuve that in Perejaume’s words speaks of ‘the great wound we all experience, in this disconcerting reality we manage and that manages us with so many left-overs, so many democratised left-overs that extend to the essential, even to the hallowed, and we don’t know what to throw out, what to keep or which sack to put them in.’ Both books have excellent drawings by Perejaume on the cover. La Dona was launched with a performance reading in the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona. Formally the poem seeks to recreate the cadences of spoken language.

In 2011 Dolors Miquel received the Valencian Alfons el Magnànim Prize for La flor invisible, (The Invisible Flower) that would be published by La Bromera. The tone and poetic style of the first part of the book marks a return to some of the poems included in Mos de Gat, and Boris, Lluna i jo that is almost an unknown quantity.

2016-2021

In 2016 Dolors Miquel was awarded the Ausiàs March Prize in Gandia for El Guant de Plàstic Rosa, (The Pink Plastic Glove) translated into Spanish by the poet Miriam Reyes (2018) and into English where it was published in July 2023 by Tenement Press in Peter Bush’s translation. The Glove has been described as ‘a book revealing huge powers of imagination and expression, written painstakingly over many years. A shocking image of a man’s corpse rotting in the sink gives rise to a singular, lyrical exploration of the experience of death.’ The book reflects insightfully about death, funeral customs, the slaughter of animals, the Romantic corpse, the body and the soul. In an approximation to a metaphysics of death.

Two years later, in 2018, she interrupted working on her penultimate book of poetry, and put together a collection of poems she had performed on many stages, some of which had proved very popular. It was published by the Fonoll publishing house. Entitled Heavy Mikel, it is a kind of wry wink directed at those people who had only seen the ‘shocking side of her work’. Undercutting it by her use of humour or taboo words. Heavy Mikel also contains some collages the poet herself made.

Ictiosaure (Ichthyosaurus) was published in 2019. As Xavier Aliaga said in his article, ‘Striking roses, freezing the heart, smelling bones’ this book ‘is constructed on three itineraries, “Roses”, “Heart” and “Bones”, a powerful poem that is the fruit of a long and painful writing process. And for that reason it punches (and how) the reader.’ Or, as Pol Guasch says: ‘The ichthyosaurus, fossilised in a millenary rock, makes the heart of a mythical past beat: “an ancient house”, “my mother’s fetish flower” or “a three-hundred-year-woman”— in present time, the time of writing.’

The final book that closes her cycle of poetic works is an anthology commissioned by the Lleida publisher Pagès that the author created in the midst of the pandemic. It is no conventional anthology but a remaking of poems revisited through the themes that run through her entire work and that comprise the nine sections of the book. Even so there are new poems. And for the first time a section devoted to madness. The anthology is illustrated by beautiful suns by Perejaume. It also has a prologue by Ìngrid Guardiola and an epilogue by Àngels Moreno. Sutura offers an overall vision of the poet’s thinking: a world that is falling apart, a modern death agony, a transformation anticipated as be long. The word ‘Sutura’ gives voice to the place where the wound is most keenly felt.

Narrative

• Maruja Reyes sóc jo (1992

Theatre

• Pallarina, poeta i puta (2012). Unpublished. Performed at the Festival de Teatre Grec in Barcelona.

Magazines

• La Verge Peluda (2002) One and a half issues.
• Collaborated in the creation of the polemical university publication in Lleida, La Higiènica (1980)[10]

Literary Prizes

• 2002 Rosa d'Or de la Pau de Poesia Popular (Glosat) dels Premis Castellitx, for Ver7s de la terra
• 2016 Premi Ausiàs March de Poesia i Premi Ausiàs Marc de Poesia,for El guant de plàstic rosa
• 2020 Premi Crítica Serra d'Or de poesia i Premi de la Crítica de poesia catalana, for Ictiosaure

Others

• Cap home és visible (2010), Medieval poetry anthology
• Noms de fum (2019), Godall Edicions. Biligual Galician-Catalan translation and prologue to Nomes de fume by the poet Míriam Ferradáns.

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