The faded city is par excellence the novel about Palma. In this excerp Mario Verdaguer recalls how El Born and the current Plaza de la Reina were.
If I remember what the Born was like fifty years ago, I feel, before it all, great surprise, seeing that it has been able to change so much without my realising. The trees have produced new leaves each year and have grown, and time, like an invisible river, has run through the middle of the street, silently carrying away things that seemed indestructible and bringing others that have slowly taken root in that place and ended up looking like they have always been there. So it is that life is a paradox. What seemed solid and indestructible disappeared with chance's gentlest breath, and what seemed ephemeral and unstable still lives on.
La ciudad desvanecida, "The Fades City", 1953
Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by José Carlos Llop.
(Maó, 1885–Barcelona, 1963). A true polymath, Mario Verdaguer was a writer, translator, artist and assiduous contributor to the press. His life was led between Maó, where he was born, Barcelona and Palma. The Civil War led him to seek refuge to carry on his creative work, even though his work then loses its early optimism.
La cuidad desvanecida (The faded city, 1953) is his most well-known work, awarded the Círculo Mallorquín’s 1952 prize celebrating their centenary. In it, Verdaguer collects the memories of his childhood in Palma, sketching a nostalgic and sentimental path through the city that had radically changed amongst the social and economic upheavals of the past few decades. The author’s gaze turns the city into literature, with descriptions of places and people that make it an excellent testimony of his sentimental memory of the city. Verdaguer is also author of other books focusing on the island, such as La isla de oro (The golden island, 1926), located on the Majorca of Archduke Ludwig Salvator, and Un verano en Mallorca (A summer on Majorca, 1959).
The Born is today one of the city main tourist spots and shopping districts. Despite its name, which relates to a jousting arena, Palma’s Born has never been used as such. The place it now occupies was once, many centuries before, a deep and narrow inlet that was the mouth of the storm channel “sa Riera”. Since the 17th century, it has hosted public events. It has been and still is a referent in the daily life of Palma as a meeting place. Its bars and cafés are also an important place for literary discussions, such as Bar Riskal, a significant reference point for the groups of writers who drove the literary recovery in Majorca in the post-war years.
