When the new Head of Department was appointed back in February 2023, we also appointed informally a ‘party planning committee’, constituted by two of my colleagues and myself. Perhaps you are part of that kind of Department in which people meet regularly for coffee breaks and lunch, and after hours for drinks, meals, or partying, but we are not. Our socializing outside the university is non-existent, except for the graduation dinner in July in Barcelona, which the students organize and some of us attend. We have been having pot luck lunches before the Christmas and the Summer holidays for many years, and in other occasions such as retirements or similar, but we live at a great distance from each other, and this makes meetings in other circumstances difficult. There is a good atmosphere indeed, but we are too isolated and too much in a hurry to get back to our distant homes in the later afternoon.
Our cafeteria used to have a separate restaurant with the same cheap menu as in the open section, and we used to meet for lunch at random, but an inopportune revamping possibly fifteen years ago, transformed the restaurant into a classier, more expensive place. This means that we use it for special occasions but not on a daily basis, at least in my Department. Everyone has got used to having coffee or lunch on their own, often in their office (I myself have my own personal microwave), and even though we opened a new common room, this is not attracting the teachers as we hoped; it will take time. Hence the party planning committee, which has so far organized three outings for lunch outside our campus, with considerable success.
I’m writing this post not just to comment on this matter, but because the last outing, this past Friday, was quite special and it has started a train of thought that goes beyond the matter of socializing. A bunch of us met Prof. Josep Maria Jaumà who, at 85, is the eldest retiree (he retired in 2006). He had offered to give us a guided tour of the beautiful cloister at the monastery of Sant Cugat, a thriving, lovely town a few kilometres south of my university, where he lives. The monastery is a 12th century building of enormous historical and artistic important, certainly worth a visit, but, as happens, this was also the place where UAB, founded thanks to a decree passed on 6 June 1968, started its activities when it was a tiny new university.
The Faculty of Philosophy and Arts was located in the monastery for about three years while the first buildings were built on the new campus (other schools were located in Barcelona); the school moved to its current location, building B, in the academic year 1972-73. Prof. Jaumà himself was not part of the original 1968 staff, as he was a secondary school teacher for about fifteen years in Spain and elsewhere. He was hired by UAB in 1973, obtained a doctoral degree in 1979 with a pioneering dissertation on poet Philip Larkin, and devoted his energies to teaching and translating mainly poetry. He is known for his translations of Shakespeare and is currently working, he told us, on translating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in verse, as it seems this has not been done either in Spanish or Catalan.
Talking with Prof. Jaumà over lunch we commented on how fragile institutional memory is. I was hired back in 1991, and I did not get to meet the Department’s founding father, whose name I don’t even recall. My teachers did not have degrees in English Philology since these were only offered from the 1980s onward; when I started teaching my subjects were part of the 1977 syllabus, the one I studied, and my guess is that if that was the first one, the first ‘licenciados’ were those of 1982. But this is a guess, not something I know for sure. By my count, apart from the dozens of part-time staff that have come and gone after longer or shorter stays, only ten colleagues have retired, of whom three have passed away. Two more tenured colleagues, our beloved Guillermina Cenoz and Mia Victori passed away before retirement, the former aged 63 and the latter only 45, a deeply felt loss in both cases. Prof. Jaumà, who is wonderfully active at 85, is a reminder that time passes fast and that if we don’t make some attempt at writing a history we will soon forget where we come from. We need a historian as soon as possible. Perhaps that could be a task for an intern with a grant of the type we get for punctual collaborations.
Prof. Jaumà’s career was also the object of our conversation. Sitting at the table with him there were seven of us. I was the only tenured civil servant. Two colleagues obtained a permanent contract rather recently, she after first coming to the Department in 2005, if I recall this correctly, with a research scholarship to write her doctoral dissertation. After this she had to leave UAB but returned as one of those associates combining diverse university teaching jobs until she got a full-time position and finally her current position, past the age of 50. The other colleague is younger but it has taken him also many years to get the same contract, at a point when UAB decided not to offer state-funded tenure of the type I enjoy for political reasons. Another colleague is now on a five-year contract, preparing for the permanent contract (these are funded by the Catalan Government). The other three colleagues are the complicated cases. One will have to leave UAB for good after 26 years as an associate because her other job is also a university position and this is no longer legal. Another can only be hired as a replacement teacher though he has been an associate for a while. The third has come to the end of her post-doctoral contract and has been hired just as a part-time associated. Prof. Jaumà, who was on the examining board when I passed my own state examination, told me he had got lucky. So did I although I had to wait eleven years for tenure counting from my first contract. I was 25 then, it seems almost a miracle that I was hired full time.
Prof. Jaumà, as I have noted, is known as a respected translator. His biography indicates that he has translated Philip Larkin, William Shakespeare, Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, David Lodge, W.B. Yeats, Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Frost and Geraldine McCaughrean. He has published a heart-felt memoir of his secondary-school years as a teacher Els meus instituts: Els Instituts de Batxillerat per dins i per fora (1981), a number of ESL handbooks, and essays such as La ciutat que volem (2003, with Jordi Menèndez), José María Valverde, lector de Joan Maragall (2004-2005) or Les cartes de Dietrich Bonhoeffer des de Barcelona with Alexander Fidora. He belongs to that generation of philologists who saw translation and the confection of critical editions as their main tasks, something that is being lost because neither activity counts as a merit for the research assessment exercises that we need to pass every six years. It is now impossible to get tenure or a full-time contract without publishing massively in academic journals and presses, and if you ever manage the feat it is highly unlikely that you abandon publication for translation and the edition of the classics. Few of us go in that direction today, which is a pity indeed. Jaumà told us that he sees his impact in terms of how his many translations have reached the readers outside the university. He is vert skeptical about the impact of academic publications, as we all should be.
I am keeping the last paragraphs for the lesson he taught us in our guided visit to the Sant Cugat cloister; by the way, as I reminded our youngest companion we, professors, are the descendant of the medieval monks so that in Spanish the word for faculty is ‘claustro’ (cloister); we are ‘professors’ because we profess the faith of education. Prof. Jaumà has spent many hours close reading the 144 chapiters in the monastery cloister (see how beautiful it is here) and has come to the conclusion that there are organized in a narrative pattern. He taught us that this pattern cannot be easily detected by visitors, who tends to appreciate the chapiters’ amazing decoration one by one. In contrast, the monks who lived cloistered in the monastery knew how to read the chapiters, not only as a whole narrative sequence surrounding the central garden but also in subsets which narrate a particular subplot, and by identifying correspondences between particular pairs in opposite locations of the quadrangle. The problem is that Prof. Jaumà has tried to persuade diverse medieval arts specialists, both local and international, of his discovery but has only managed to make a nuisance of himself. He has been curtly told that no cloister offers evidence of any narrative sequence. I told him about Philippa Langley, the tenacious amateur who found the tomb of King Richard III in a parking lot of Leicester (you might want to see the delicious film The Lost King). Perseverance is the key. I find it wonderfully apt that a specialist in poetry can read the poetry of the old stones and, frankly, what he told us seemed worth considering.
And here’s a little bit of philology: the Bible speaks of the Garden of Eden, but apparently this is a reference to “the Old Persian chahar bagh ‘four-part garden’,” called paradeisos in Greek. Monastery cloisters eventually reproduced the same scheme in the inner garden surrounded by the cloister, supposed to recall the Biblical Paradise of which Adam and Eve were expelled. Just in case you ever (mis)imagined Paradise as a wild jungle… Next time I attend a meeting of my school’s faculty, or cloister, I will try to remember that this comes from the monks’ meetings in the cloister to enjoy their version of Paradise. When in Sant Cugat, I will read and enjoy the stories told by the stone chapiters, still surviving after nine centuries in the beautiful cloister.