Bibliografia sobre Joan Mascaró i Fornés
Thirty-three years ago today, on 19 March, Joan Mascaró i Fornés attained samadhi. That day, in Comberton, a village near Cambridge, the first Majorcan to ever behold it, experienced the instance in which body and soul take diverging paths. As far as I know, no one before or since has experienced such joy, a state that, fortunately, is only attained by those who have followed the Gita and made it their guide. In his beautiful “Reminiscences”, which appear in his posthumous book The Creation of Faith, Mascaró reflects on his childhood, which he spent in “the most beautiful place on this earth”. He acknowledges how lucky he was to grow up amid such surroundings, yet bemoans not having, at the time, a reason for life. Luckily, a reason would soon present itself. One fine day, a fellow classmate handed him a Spanish translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Despite the text’s shortcomings –possibly conceptual–, he fully captured its essence. And everything changed.
It was only fitting that the Gita would turn his life into a constant avatar and occupy it for the next fifty years: from his youth in Majorca, in the years prior to the Great War, to maturity, which arrived –in part thanks to his own contributions– during the promising decade of the 1960s. Over the course of this half century, Mascaró was forced to evade a seemingly endless string of wars: two World Wars; the Spanish-Moroccan War, in which karma saved him from absurd immolation; and the Spanish Civil War, which he rejected and dismissed as “uncivil”. It was no accident, therefore, that he ended up dedicating his life to a hymn that narrates a battle, Kurukshetra, during the Mahabharata War: the Bhagavad Gita (the Song of God). In the Introduction to Chapter 11, “The Cosmic Vision”, in the direct translation to Catalan, Mascaró makes it abundantly clear:
“[...] most of the poem’s seven hundred verses, which are divided into eighteen chapters, one for each day the battle lasted, is a dialogue between Arjuna and his teacher and friend Krishna. Arjuna does not want to fight: he feels the sadness of the ‘dark night of the soul’. But the teacher demonstrates the need to fight and shows him the glorious path of victory as he reveals the mysteries of the soul and universe”.
At first glance, it is hard to see a glorious path of victory in what British historian Eric John Hobsbawm defined as the “Thirty-One Years’ War”, which spans the period between the start of the conflict of 1914 and the surrender of Nazi Germany. Mascaró dealt with it all by studying and expanding his knowledge in Majorca and England, teaching in Sri Lanka and Barcelona and working as a translator and creator once again in Great Britain. A great deal of movement, perhaps, for someone eager to unravel “the mysteries of the soul and universe”. Yet, this sage and mystic farmer and compatriot had already begun outlining his path to enlightenment. A path along which the Gita would serve as guide. According to Òscar Pujol, by this point it had become “his Gita”. Between mid-1935, when the above-mentioned Chapter 11 was released in Majorca and Barcelona, and 1973, the year in which Penguin Classics published the English translation of the Dhammapada, Mascaró compiled, taught and transuded into English the tenets of Indian spirituality. Initially, as tends to happen in academia, his work elicited all manner of remarks. Soon thereafter, however, on 12 December 1938, Rabindranath Tagore wrote to him from Uttarayan, his ashram in Santiniketan, to settle the matter once and for all.
“Dear professor,
I have too often seen Upanishads rendered into English by scholars who are philologists and miss the delight of the immediate realisation of truth expressed in the original texts. On the other hand, in our own country there appeared in the later sophisticated age interpreters who in their scholarly insensitivity had no compunction in torturing the utterances of our ancient poet-prophets into a conformity to the metaphysical models of their own logic. They robbed the living words of their voice, the luminous visions of their light. Our rishis’ minds were simple, childlike in the sublimity of their wisdom, but those who trapped their thoughts into a cage and clipped from them all natural self-contradictions that bore testimony to their living worth, were grown old, –the delicacy of their spiritual touch hardened into traditional callosities.
“And these are the reasons why I feel grateful to you for your translation which fortunately is not strictly literal and therefore nearer to truth, and which is done in a right spirit and in a sensitive language that has caught from those great words the inner voice that goes beyond the boundaries of words”.
Silence. Lamps of Fire, the original English version of which saw the light thanks to his friend Francesc de Borja Moll (1958), contains verses from a number of sacred texts (the Vedas, the Bible, the Quran, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching) and the diverse voices of thinkers, poets, prophets, yogis, saints and intellectuals of all beliefs. All of which leads to the place where the soul and universe become one. Like an infinite white background, or the horizon, where everything fades. William Radice, disciple and poet (in that order), thanked his mother, Betty, who had links to the leading English-language publishing group, for enabling these Himalayas of the soul to pervade the collective imagination of virtually everyone in our geographic and economic environment. What Joan Mascaró succeeded in conveying were the values, thoughts and sentiments of Indian poetry, of Hinduism’s spiritual wisdom, crossing the threshold of a foreign realm that no colonial or imperial phenomenon could absorb. Something, like the samadhi, of which only great masters are capable.
Jai Guru Deva (‘long live the teacher’), sketched by eminent Sanskrit scholar Òscar Pujol, the person who best continued Mascaró’s work exploring the Gita.
Head bowed and arms outstretched towards the guru’s feet. With the words in Sanskrit above, George Harrison concluded the letter he had written to the person who had helped him understand the path to Nirvana and for who, under the inspiration of the Tao Te King, he wrote the song “The Inner Light”:
Arrive without travelling / See without looking / Do all without doing
Literature, harmony, poetry, beauty... Here we find the musicality that indicates we are on the right track. Oscar Wilde summed it up in his famous aphorism: “Achilles is even now more actual and real than Wellington”. Once again, the solution to dilemmas, paradoxes, war. Taking the Gita as a reference, in Chapter 2, verses 31 and 32, Lord Krishna says:
“Think thou also of thy duty and do not waver. There is no greater good for a warrior than to fight in a righteous war”.
“There is a war that opens the doors of heaven, Arjuna! Happy the warriors whose fate is to fight such war”.
Despite this, Mascaró seemed to identify more with the sentiment held by one of the responses that, in the final chapter, Chapter 18 (verses 1 and 20), Krishna gives to Arjuna’s question:
“Speak to me, Krishna, of the essence of renunciation, and of the essence of surrender”.
“When one sees Eternity in things that pass away and Infinity in finite things, then one has pure knowledge”.
In the final decades, the 70s and 80s, the avatar slowed. And Mascaró was aware of this. He knew that his passion for illuminating us with his chants in Sanskrit and Pali had come full circle. Although the lamps were still warm, the time had come to deliver his maxims, nourished by long deliberated mysticism. The Retreat, the cottage in which he lived, was indeed a haven of peace. This is where he entertained, talked, hypnotised... In his description, William Radice brought his ashram / vihara / “chapel” to life.
“Your home is still truly a quiet place; its thick old walls shield it from traffic on the road; but your house and study were a Retreat in more than a physical sense. In order to go deep into the texts you studied and translated, in order to develop your inmost thoughts and reflections, in order to build up that network of friendship with the great poets and thinkers of the past, you built a Retreat within yourself. It was your inner stillness that I felt in your study, and which can still be felt, even though you are physically gone”.
He reaffirmed this sentiment several years later, upon the death of Kathleen May Mascaró:
“How evocative that description of Joan’s study is to all of us who remember the house, the timeless way in which Joan’s aura and Kathleen’s household arts blended so perfectly, where a paella cooked by her or a Rioja opened by him seemed like the soma of the gods and the fires she kept burning in every room were like the sacred homagni!”.
Indeed. Those of us who were fortune enough to set foot inside will never forget the air of peace, meditation, perhaps even Nirvana. The ideal place to fill sixty-seven notebooks with reflections, thoughts and quotes, concise, perfect aphorisms shaped between woman and disciple and transmitted as a legacy, a testament. Thus, The Creation of Faith showed the other, more intimate side of his early lamps of fire.
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“[...] and I loved him because he was a good person and spoke sweetly”. So wrote Jordi Griera, son of his close friend, Rafel. There are not many living islanders who had the immense privilege to meet and listen to Joan, and less still following the passing of three of the individuals who were most earnestly involved in spreading word of him and his legacy: his biographer, Joan Maimó i Vadell, author of the book Joan Mascaró i Fornés. El múltiples espais de la saviesa (UIB, Palma, 1990); researcher Gregori Mir i Mayol, compiler of Correspondència de Joan Mascaró, 1930-1986 (2 volumes, Editorial Moll, Majorca, 1986) and editor of several texts and prologues about Mascaró, published under the title Diàlegs amb l’Índia (Proa, Barcelona, 2001); and (the father) Joan Francesc March i Ques, with who he exchanged endearing and richly detailed letters, published as Cartes d’un mestre a un amic (El Tall, Palma, 1993). For those of us who remain, and my sincere apologies to anyone I have forgotten –Caterina Vaquer, Antònia Quetglas, Joan Alós, Elisabet Abeyà, Xavier Margais, Francesc Moll and yours truly– as well as Jordi Griera in Catalonia, it gives us immense delight to keep the torch burning and, with the joy he embodied, evoke his values, message and faith. Fortunately, the new generation of Mascaró scholars (such as Antoni Mas, Francesc Vicens, Sebastià Alzamora, Andreu Sansó, Margalida Munar, Joan Mut, Margalida Calafat, Sílvia Ventanyol and, undoubtedly, a long list of others) provides ample assurance that, from a wide range of research perspectives, his teachings will continue to live on. A prime example of their implication is the initiative undertaken by the digitisation team at the Joan Mascaró i Fornés Library, donated by Joan Maimó, Caterina Vaquer and Gregori Mir to the University of the Balearic Islands, which, under the guidance of Miquel Pastor and Eduardo del Valle, has begun to develop tools to help people learn more about our compatriot’s work and persona. In this regard, the UIB has been unflinching in its continued recognition of Joan Mascaró, who, at the behest of the Department of Catalan Language and Literature, in the Board of Governors’ meeting on 11 June 1983, was awarded the university’s highest distinction and proclaimed honorary doctor. He thus became the third Majorcan to receive this distinction, after Guillem Colom and Francesc de Borja Moll. His illness and passing on St Joseph’s Day 1987 impeded the investiture, which was eventually held on 5 September 1997 in the parish church in Santa Margalida. It is no coincidence that it took place the year of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth and the tenth anniversary of his departing. At Dr Antoni Mas i Fornés’ prompting, he and yours truly coordinated the volume Joan Mascaró i Fornés (1897-1987), the presentation of which in the conference hall at Banca March capped a series of activities, which included the investiture of Catalan philosopher Raimon Panikkar, devoted to Mascaró. The event proved a success thanks to the contributions of this financial institution, the UIB, the Majorca Island Council and the Santa Margalida Town Council.
To conclude, on a more intimate note, I must admit that meeting Joan Mascaró had a profound impact on my life both personally and professionally. I was eagerly seeking employment in a British university when I first went to see him in Comberton. That was in early 1978. For two and a half years, while I worked as a lector of Spanish and Catalan at the University of Leeds, I readily seized the opportunity to visit him half a dozen times. We also saw each other in Palma, during his last visit to the island, in Easter 1979. With him present, I began my teaching career, first at Leeds and afterwards, in 1986, at the UIB. During my forty-year academic career, there are few things I have relished as much as attempting to assimilate the cornerstones of his teachings –look people in the eye, speak softly and enthusiastically, smile, inspire...– and, with the same love he radiated, reproduce them in the teaching duties I have been lucky enough to have. Fortunately for me, for the past twenty years, his portrait, painted by his good friend Joan Maimó, has graced my work area in the Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos Building on the UIB campus. His memory and recognition have remained constant, as has the pleasure of actively participating alongside former student and now colleague Antoni Mas in the numerous conferences around Majorca and, particularly, in the tributes we held in his memory in 1997 and 2017. It therefore gives me great pleasure to conclude my time here at the UIB by signing this article, which, through new technologies, I hope will heighten your knowledge of and admiration for this farmer from Santa Margalida, who worked tirelessly to bring light and peace to the world.
Gonçal Artur López Nadal
Son Comparet, Son Servera, 19 March 2020