Joaquín Ruyra
1858–1939
Biography
Joaquim Ruyra i Oms, whose name also appears as Joaquín Ruyra, was born in Girona in 1858 and died in Barcelona in 1939. He wrote short stories, poetry and translations in Catalan, and is regarded as one of the great narrators of the twentieth century and a key figure of modern Catalan literature. He studied law in Barcelona from 1875 to 1881 but never practised, devoting himself to literature instead. He later settled in Blanes, a coastal town in the La Selva region of Catalonia, and the town became the setting for much of his fiction.
He began writing in Spanish but soon turned to Catalan under the influence of the poet Jacint Verdaguer, whom he met. His stories draw on the speech of the fishermen and peasants of the coast and on the wooded hills of the Gavarres. He won prizes at the Jocs Florals in Girona, Olot and Barcelona, took part in the First International Congress of the Catalan Language in 1906, and in 1918 entered the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, where he worked with Pompeu Fabra on a unified system for the language. His best-known stories appear in Marines i boscatges (1903), later reissued as Pinya de rosa (1920). A wildfire that destroyed cork oak forests on his family's land in 1928 is seen as marking the end of his literary career.
The book on this site is La parada, which some English sources render as The Trap. Published in 1919, it gathers seven stories in which Ruyra looks back on his bohemian youth with a penitent's distance. Like his earlier collections, it grows out of the Gavarres and the coast. His short fiction has been compared with writers as different as Melville and Hemingway.
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Books
La Parada
by Joaquín Ruyra
The title novella follows a band of boys on the coast as they set out with birdlime and decoys for a great autumn bird hunt, an adventure that turns into a lesson about friendship and growing up. It is followed by shorter stories of youth and memory, a comic tale of seminarians…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.