"La passejada" is a poem in which Miquel Ferrà describes a night of storm and insomnia in the Galatzó mountain, where the soul of Count Mal wanders.
... When I raised my head, what pine cones
Amongst the ruffled pines!
Against the moonlight,
Five ravens on three hanged men.
I somehow reached
The crag at Galatzó.
Its ridge passed behind the mountain
In the darkness of a shower.
The storm soaked my forehead,
And echoed around the cliffs.
I wanted to sit by the spring
Which was lost up in the rocks.
Below the black poplars
A ghost stopped me:
Amongst the streaming rain,
Lit up with each lightning strike,
The Comte Mal, by the trough,
Was watering his horse.
“La passejada” (The Walk) A mig camí (Midway), 1926
Translated by Richard Mansell.
(Palma, 1885 – 1947). Miquel Ferrà studied law and humanities in Barcelona, where he worked as a librarian and founded and managed a student hall of residence. When he returned to Palma in 1936, he played an active role in literary circles of the time. He was a guiding light for different generations, always striving to act as a literary and civic mentor, particularly in times of adversity like the period he lived through when he returned to Mallorca, when Catalan literature was banned from public use and the local language was subject to prohibitions and persecution. He is the author of polished, carefully refined poetry in keeping with models upheld by the Catalan Noucentista movement, which was in vogue in Barcelona in his early years as a student, and in which the landscape acquires meaning when it is humanized by working the land and organizing it spatially through agricultural and livestock activities. Miquel Ferrà fostered the idea of a modern, educated, moderately happy Mallorca, which the 1936 Fascist coup d’état shattered. He is considered to be the «urban» poet of his generation in Mallorca. His poetry, taken from various publications and almost all contained in the 1962 Poesies completes (Complete Works of Poetry), can be found in its entirety in the collection A mig camí (Midway) (1926), which encompasses two short previous collections, La rosada (1919) and Cançó d'ahir (1917).
“La passejada” (“The Walk”) is a disturbing poem that describes a sleepless stormy night on Galatzó mountain and an encounter with the soul of the Evil Count.
The hill of Galatzó, pyramidal in shape and separated from the other peaks of the Tramuntana mountains, is a magical mountain and a land of legends. A large part of its land belongs to the estate that was property of the Count of Santa Maria de Formiguera. The second count, Ramon Safortesa, held power over those living on his land, and he demanded that they made feudal payments to him. This is how he got the nickname Mal (bad). His evil nature meant that he was condemned to roam the land as a punishment for his behaviour. Townspeople, especially those from around Galatzó, attributed the legend and song of Count Arnau on his horse to the 'Comte Mal', even changing the words to fit.
The figure of the 'Comte Mal' is a subject approached by Majorcan writers in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it was already a popular legend and there are references in folk tales from the Majorcan oral tradition.
