Before being the Director of the National Library (2003-2007), before winning the Nadal Prize with her novel Azul (1994) and thus beginning a late and fortunate literary career, Rosa Regàs (who died on July 17 at the age of 90) had been a brilliant editor in the posh, red-blooded and creative Barcelona of the “divine years”, as her brother Oriol, founder of the legendary Bocaccio nightclub in 1967, called them. Rosa Regàs epitomised the subversive spirit, the desire for fun and the appeal of a caste of creators who were transforming everything, from architecture to cinema, from literature to journalism.
When she started working at Seix-Barral in 1963, she had been married for twelve years and had several children in her home, but her attractiveness, energy and vitality were not in keeping with those of a mother. In the innovative and hedonistic Barcelona of the gauche divineRosa became the “queen of the divine republic”, a sort of muse and magician who, together with Carlos Barral, learned the publishing trade well. In 1970, when Barral broke with his partner and founded Barral Editores, she emancipated herself and launched two of her own publishing houses, Ediciones Bausán, dedicated to children’s literature, and La Gaya Ciencia, with which she completed the trefoil of rebellious publishing houses, with Anagrama and Tusquets, which emerged at the end of the sixties. There, modernists like Juan Benet —with whom she loved so much— and modernísimos (or brand new) such as Felix de Azua, Javier Marias and Vicente Molina Foix (all three would sign Three educational stories in 1975), Eugenio Trias, Manuel Vazquez Montalbán or the first Alvaro Pombo.
If the publishing house was a crucial launching pad, the two magazines that were born in its shadow were no less so: in 1973, Bis Architecture (it would last until 1985) and in 1975 the Notebooks of the Gay Scienceof which only four essential numbers would come out to know the hive of intellectual novelties of that transitional moment. And when the Notebooks were coming to an end, Regàs came up with one of his brilliant ideas: to launch a series of brief educational essays on the political concepts that mobilised public discussion. This is how the Library for Political Disclosure was born in 1976, where Felipe González explained what socialism was, Carrillo what the democratic rupture consisted of, Enrique Tierno Galván what the left was, and finally, José Luis López Aranguren what was meant when talking about fascisms (in the plural).
The phenomenal success of the collection, which led to increased print runs to the point of saturating the market, together with some shady financial management problems, accelerated Regàs’s twenty-year stint as an editor and her 1983 stint as a translator in Geneva. It was a year of change, because her relationship with Juan Benet also ended at that time.
After ten years as an interpreter and cosmopolitan life (between 1983 and 1993), during which he wrote an essay-guide on Ginebra (1987) and a first tentative novel (Memory of Almator1991), Rosa Regàs concentrated on her vocation as a writer, which she combined with some institutional positions, such as the direction of the American Athenaeum of the Casa de América in Madrid (1994-1998) or the direction of the National Library. With the story of the sea, cruise and psychological iridescence of her novel Azul conquered many readers, who had to settle for the tales of Poor heart (1998) until he published his next novel, moon moon (1999), an immersion in post-war memory with which the writer threw her weight behind her against oblivion and which won the City of Barcelona Award.
The literary agent Carme Balcells had promotional T-shirts printed that linked the author’s two stages: on the chest it announced Moon, moon; on her back, a (macho, alas) echo of the sixties: “Rosa Regás, you look so good.” Afterwards, she continued to be successful: in 2001 she won the Planeta prize with Dorotea’s song; are Diary of a summer grandmother (2004) was turned into a television series a year later with the excellent role of Rosa Sardà; and, finally, in 2013 it received the Biblioteca Breve award for a love story in two times, Chamber musicwith which she recreated the remote and very present post-war period. Behind the scenes of the fiction we can see the eager and unruly young woman of the sixties, the frightened girl locked up in a convent school by her grandfather, the resolute woman with clear ideas as always, the decisive editor and the writer she always wanted to be.