Sant Llorenç des Cardassar, hometown of Salvador Galmés, is in Flor de card scene of this modernist rural novel that deals with the clash between the city and the countryside.
In Majorca's Llevant, in an ignored and monotonous valley, there is a field of teasels. I picked its 'flower' and today I am showing it to you. It is humble, plain, it does not smell, it is sharp and covered in prickles. It does not give much more than information about the land it grows in! But perhaps in its dry and poor heart there is a seed - the favourite food of goldfinches - and here you have the reason why I undertook the task of picking it and showing it to you. If you do not refuse it, especially if it satisfies in some way your hunger for beauty and the ideal, the work will not have been in vain and it will have been well paid.
Flor de card, 1911
Translated by Richard Mansell.
(Sant Llorenç des Cardassar, 1876 – 1951). Galmés’s rural origins gave him real-life experiences of agriculture and the wild which filled his narrative work with authenticity. In 1890 he entered the seminary where Llorenç Riber also studied, and had Antoni M. Alcover and Miquel Costa i Llobera as teachers. Alcover’s influence drew him towards the use and defence of Catalan as a language of learned expression. He worked with him on Alcover’s dictionary, and the First Conference of the Catalan Language. He began to take part in the Jocs Florals literary competition and also translated some Latin authors for the Bernat Metge collection, as well as starting the publication of Ramon Llull’s works, of whom he also published a biography. His narrative works constitutes one of the most interesting contributions to Catalan narrative in the early 20th century and was not published as a single volume until the 1940s-1950s: Flor de card (Thistle flower, 1949), Novel·letes rurals (Rural novellas, 1953), Quadrets i pinzellades (Paintings and brushstrokes, 1956). He also wrote in the regional press to defend historical and artistic heritage, and also to argue for greater autonomy for the Balearic Islands. In the post-war years he was named corresponding member of the Acadèmia de Bones Lletres in Barcelona and the Institute of Catalan Studies, which at that point was in hiding.
The shock between the city and the countryside is the theme of the modernist rural novel, and we can place Salvador Galmés’s work in this genre. In Flor de card, the action takes place explicitly in Sant Llorenç del Cardassar.
Galmés and many Majorcan writers in the early 20th century lacked any sort of space for the novel as a genre, apart from the short stories that were distributed to the scarce audience of readers. "Flor de card" is an attempt to fill this gap, and it can be seen as a modernist novel in a rural setting, without going as far as the drama that was current in the genre. It is about the love between a young couple from Sant Llorenç, given that the place names and setting locate it in Galmés's home town, and it ends with her rebuff and his death in the colonial wars. Galmés presents this war as absurd and he bemoans the infantile anti-Americanism of the Spanish government. There is a detailed analysis of the psychology of the two protagonists in their teenage years and experience their first romance. We could talk of a literature of local customs and manners in the sense of the description of places where the events take place, but not as an objective of the narrative. There is a counterpoint to rural life where it is understood that everything that takes place is useful and necessary, included as an integral part of the passage of time and the seasons, and cities are where all manner of evils and incomprehensible situations come from. Salvador Galmés only wrote or published between 1908 and 1928, and then stopped writing, perhaps because his literary aspirations did not sit well with his vocation as a priest.
