Màrius Torres: physician, patient, poet

Catalan medicine has not been very generous to doctor-poets who cross the border of dilettantism to create a work of general interest. Màrius Torres, from Lleida and the son of a doctor, is the exception. His biography is brief: born in 1910, he studied his degree in Barcelona, specialising in gastroenterology. At the age of 23 he travelled through France and Italy, where he was dazzled by Florence, and returned to practise briefly in his native city. When he was 25, he developed tuberculosis, which confined him to the Puigdolena clinic in Sant Quirze de Safaja until his death in 1942. He wrote his poetry before, during and in the months immediately following the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, as the war was coming to an end, he wrote: “Now that the powerful arm of the furies terrorises the city of ideals we tried to defend, among the ruins of hanging dreams, closer to the earth, Fatherland, protect us: - the earth will never know how to lie.” When in the clinic he continued to study medicine and also delved into the work of literary greats, such as Carles Riba, Verlaine and Baudelaire. He devoted special attention to music, to the point that towards the end of his life he considered putting some of his poems to music: “serene and sweet music, you follow our souls along a dark corridor.” Joan Sales published his work in Mexico in 1947.

The work of Màrius Torres deals with traditional poetic matters, while also bringing a renewal of Catalan literature. It is intimate and crafted with cultured colloquial speech, thanks to the fact that at the time Catalan had once again become an established literary language. Apart from the ideological contrast between his republicanism and the spiritualism he had experienced since his crisis began, his work opens up a poetic universe that moves between the physical and spiritual worlds. He begins a search for the sense of existence with the traditional symbolist baggage: idealist and essentialist subjectivism. He is an honest author, delicate, discreet in his confessions and polished in his verses.

We have to imagine that the difficult era he lived in, his early illness, his confinement, his view of his nearing death, and his knowledge as a doctor, must all have contributed to producing his very singular poetry that is still accessible to the modern reader. In his work, Torres breaks down some of the great arguments of humanity. He is a love poet, with the idealised Mahalta the unique object of his verses: “You, who always welcomes me with such a high look, tell me: what colour are your eyes, Mahalta?” In his correspondence with Joan Sales he never reveals who this Mahalta is, even though she has been identified as a Girona women, Mercè Figueras, the daughter of a doctor who moved to Barcelona. There are a lot of photographs of the two, especially in the clinic. Yet, he does tell us that the name Mahalta comes from the Mafalda de Pulla, an 11th century noble woman, of the house of Pulla-Calàbria, wife of count Ramon Berenguer II.

Torres is also a poet of solitude, of autumn light, of winter landscapes, of silent, nocturnal wilderness: “I awoke all alone in an old garden that I do not know whether it is my prison or my empire.” Friendship he portrays as being comparable with love, and he also sings of the passage of time: “the divine succession of the years” and transcendence: “eternity is merely a present that spreads itself out.” His desire for perfection means his sentences are far from free of rhetoric, enemies of declamation and sentimentalism. His is a spirit sometimes tempted by the beauty of melancholy: “melancholy confines you so sweetly, that to surrender myself requires no further ornament,” but also by hope: “How strange! And at this sad and lonely hour in which we feel most shipwrecked and most deserted in the world, our praying being is reborn.”

Above all, he is the poet of death, which he knew was so close, understanding that Puigdolena would be his last home: “sweet angel of death, if you must come, better you come now.” Bitter is how he describes moribund youth, and death responds: “my flavour is made of millions of lives that my kiss has snuffed out.”

Màrius Torres, the young poet offers us, after so many decades, a literature charged with depth, accessible to any sensitive audience, capable of making sense of many moments in our lives with a captivating sincerity.

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