Already since from Entre el coral i l'espiga, Blai Bonet began to express poetically the bond of a child of war with the marine landscape, as he does here in "The sea of Montdragó".
I was a child of the war, a child of thorns,
Who, beside the sea at Montdragó,
Had barbed wire in his guts.
But today I have returned with the tensest
And purest humanity to the rough bushes,
To the deep-green pines, to the grey rocks
With little greenery and the
soul of the steppe.
I have contemplated,
amongst the almond trees
So pink and the sober pines, the high
And violent sea and the other placid child,
Who I was not when I was playing at death.
I have seen your chubby, tender,
Little Antoni, simple as though the joy
From his face was washed with goodness.
And watching him plant green cuttings,
By my robust side I thought I saw
A new shoot of strange childhood,
which, in the grey and violent sea of Montdragó,
Was naked, warlike, sad and tall.
«Cala Mondragó» Comèdia, 1960
Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by Cosme Aguiló.
(Santanyí, 1926 – 1997). Blai Bonet was a poet and novelist, born in Santanyí to a rural family in 1926. He studied at the seminary in Palma but a lung condition forced him to be hospitalised for a long period of time. His book Entre el coral i l’espiga (Between the coral and the ear of grain, 1952) formally broke with the tradition of the Majorcan school of poetry, which followed the writings of Joan Alcover and Miquel Costa i Llobera. Cant espiritual (Spiritual song, 1953) gave Bonet public recognition for the first time, winning the Carles Riba prize. Comèdia (Comedy, 1960) brought his work closer to social realism and closed a cycle. This was followed by L’evangeli segons un de tants (The gospel according to one of many, 1967), Els fets (The facts, 1974), Has vist algun cop, Jordi Bonet, can Amat a l’ombra? (Jordi Bonet, have you ever seen can Amat in the dark?, 1976), and more. In 1958 he published El mar (The sea), which has been turned into a film, which features memories of his childhood and youth, including his stay in the Caubet sanatorium. Judas i la primavera (Judas and springtime, 1963), Míster Evasió (Mister Evasion, 1969) and Si jo fos fuster i tu et diguessis Maria (If I were a carpenter and you were called Maria, 1972) are a type of diary, where a collage of texts brings us closer to Bonet’s personal universe in all its splendour. These were followed by La motivació i el film (Motivation and film, 1990) and Pere Pau (Peter Paul, 1992). He wrote commissioned works on art and wrote pieces for the press until the end of his life.
“Cala Mondragó”, (Mondragó Cove) represents a plaintive link between a child in the Civil War with the marine and at that time uninhabited landscape at Mondragó, as well as generations of Santanyí families.
The sea at Mondragó, in the words of Blai Bonet, produces on the one hand a sensation of beauty in contemplating the perfect Mediterranean ecosystem in miniature, where you can see everything: a wood of pines and juniper, sand dunes, and pools where water birds roam. On the other hand, it reminds us that this is the exception, that this is the sensation of a lost opportunity in not preserving places like this, of not being more respectful, of not wanting to strike a balance between tourism and protecting the Majorcan coast. His poem deals with Montdragó before tourism, where the coast was a place associated with fishing and smuggling. These were places where people picked asparagus in the spring and mushrooms in the autumn, where people hunted with nets and stones and dropped lines on the coast, or collected rock samphire for pickling.
