When Catalan met Friulian : Carles Cardó and Pier Paolo Pasolini

The aim of this article is to trace the key moments in the relationship between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Carles Cardó which, despite its brevity, resulted in an extremely important legacy for Italian Catalan Studies: the anthology Fiore di poeti catalani. In 1946 Pasolini approached the Catalan poet and priest, who at that time was living in exile in Switzerland with the aim of establishing a dialogue between Friulian and Catalan, two minority Romance languages that were minoritised by their respective States. He asked Cardó to compile and translate into Italian an anthology of the best poems written in the Catalan language, with a view to publishing them in his magazine Il Stroligut. A study of the correspondence between the two intellectuals, as well as the texts included in the anthology and the accompanying notes and essays, reveals the reasons for and circumstances of this linguistic and cultural kinship between Catalonia and Friulia. The translation of the Catalan poems served as a protest against Franco’s policies as well as providing Friulians with a model of a minority language that had successfully resisted the slings and arrows of History.