Maria Mercè Marçal
“Three times a rebel”: a woman, working class and Catalan – and one of the first Catalan poets to write openly about love between women.
Maria Mercè Marçal was born in Barcelona and spent her childhood in the village of Ivars d’Urgell, which she always considered her home. A scholarship allowed her to attend secondary school in Lleida; she studied classical philology in Barcelona and became a teacher of Catalan language and literature.
In 1972 she married the poet Ramon Pinyol, and in 1973 the two co-founded the publishing house Llibres del Mall. Her first collection of poems, “Cau de llunes” (1977), won the Carles Riba Prize. It contains her famous motto: she was grateful to fate for three gifts – to have been born a woman, of the working class and of an oppressed nation – and for the “turbid azure of being three times a rebel”. Her work revolved around the Catalan language, social justice and feminism.
After separating from her husband, she formed a long-term relationship with the philosopher Fina Birulés. In 1980 her daughter Heura was born, an experience she wrote about in her poems. Marçal was one of the first Catalan poets to write explicitly about love between women. She translated Colette, Marguerite Yourcenar, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva into Catalan.
Her only novel, “La passió segons Renée Vivien” (1994), the result of ten years of research into the life of the lesbian poet Renée Vivien, won several major awards. Marçal died of cancer in Barcelona in 1998, aged 45. Many of her poems have been set to music.