Dr Mariàngela Vilallonga
Mariàngela Vilallonga, Emeritus Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Girona, President of the Prudenci Bertrana Foundation, and full member of the Royal European Academy of Doctors (READ), took part on October 1 in the presentation of the book «Always Waiting: Clara Campoamor and Republican Exile in Switzerland,» to which she contributed the study «Aurora Bertrana and Mercè Rodoreda in Their Swiss Exile.» The event was held at the Voltaire Museum Institute in Geneva and also featured Cristina Rosario Martínez Torres, the book’s editor, who, drawing on largely unpublished documentation, sheds new historical and literary light on the context of forced Republican migration to Switzerland.
Divided into eleven studies, the book provides new information on Clara Campoamor’s two stays in the Alpine country during her long exile, her work as a journalist, her involvement with the League of Nations and the then newly created United Nations, as well as her political and legal activism alongside Antoinette Quinche and her feminism within the global suffragist movement. The studies devoted to the Madrid-born writer are complemented by others examining Spanish-Swiss relations during the Franco regime, the Swiss Aid movement for children of the Spanish Civil War, the influence of ties between the two countries during this period, and other parallel exiles, such as those of Bertrana and Rodoreda. These are presented in the second part of the book, focused on Republican exile in Switzerland.
«It was in Geneva that Mercè Rodoreda fulfilled a large part of her literary project, and it was also there that she managed to immortalize the Barcelona in which her work is set, despite the distance separating her from it. In fact, she preserved in her memory an intact image of the atmosphere of the city of her youth and succeeded in sketching a portrait of 20th-century Catalan society like no one before her,» Vilallonga summarized in presenting her thesis. The academic had already devoted several studies to the exile of the two Catalan authors in Switzerland. A year earlier, she also led the session «Rodoreda in Geneva: Echoes in the City and in Her Work,» at an event organized by the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia in Switzerland.
Clara Campoamor
Vilallonga also explained that Bertrana’s likewise forced exile following the outbreak of the war led her to a country where she had previously studied, and where she wrote part of her work. «Aurora Bertrana was a magnificent prose writer and a great adventurer. Fascinated by the world and by literature, the journeys she made to Polynesia, Switzerland, and Morocco provided material for novels, short stories, and above all, articles. Equally interested in society, she was a pioneer in addressing feminism and other cultures, always from a fervent defense of the Catalan language and culture,» she noted.
After serving as Minister of Culture of the Government of Catalonia between March 2019 and September 2020, a position for which she resigned as Vice President of the Institute of Catalan Studies, Mariàngela Vilallonga resumed her teaching activity until her retirement three academic years ago. In 2016, she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi, the highest distinction granted by the Government of Catalonia, in recognition of her research in Latin humanistic literature of the Crown of Aragon. She was also appointed a board member of the publishing group Grup62.
