Josep Pla i Casadevall (Catalan pronunciation: [ʒuˈzɛp ˈpla]; 8 March 1897 – 23 April 1981) was a Spanish journalist and a popular author.
As a journalist he worked in France, Italy, Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, from where he wrote political and cultural chronicles in Catalan and Spanish.
The emptiness that he felt in his life at the university did not prevent him from involving himself in another environment that would focus the intellectual disorientation of his youth – the Barcelona Ateneu Club, with its library and above all the daily tertulia (discussion group) led by Dr. Joaquim Borralleras and attended by celebrities such as Josep Maria de Sagarra, Eugenio d'Ors and Francesc Pujols.
He continued travelling through Europe (France, the Soviet Union, Britain), and in 1925 he published his first book, Coses Vistes which was a great success and sold out in a week.
His book of the notable events of those months - of great historic value - is El advenimiento de la República (The coming of the Republic).
He continued his exile in Rome, where he wrote a good part of the immense Historia de la Segunda República Española (History of the Second Spanish Republic) - an assignment for Francesc Cambó, one of the financiers of the military uprising - which Pla would refuse to re-publish during his lifetime despite its great historical value.
In the autumn of 1938, Enberg and Pla traveled to Biarritz and from there they managed to reach San Sebastián where they entered the Francoist-controlled part of Spain.
Overwhelmed by the course of events of the immediate post-war period and before the unexpected failure of his project at La Vanguardia, he moved to the Empordà (Girona) and separated from Adi Enberg.
Of Israel for instance, he left a unique testimony of its first years of existence as a state – he visited it in 1957, arriving in Tel Aviv in a boat from Marseille full of displaced Jews.
Pla had to live under censorship for much of his life: first during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, later in Italy and Germany (where he worked as a correspondent during the rise of the Falange), and during Francisco Franco's long rule.
Although he always maintained a moderate political stance to allow him to publish, he was deeply uncomfortable with Franco's tireless censorship (he wrote in one of his diaries that it was "the worst that [I] have known", carried out by "servants of fanaticism").
His works show a subjective and colloquial vision, anti-literary, though in which he exhibits enormous stylistic effort in calling things by their names and "coming up with the precise adjective", one of his most persistent literary obsessions.
An untiring writer, his viewpoint was that life is chaotic, irrational, and unjust, while the longing for equality and revolutions are a delusion that incites worse wrongs than those that it tries to put a stop to.
During the first years of the Francoist regime, due to the complete restriction of the Catalan edition, the following works were published in Spanish: Guía de la Costa Brava (1941), Las ciudades del mar (1942), Viaje en autobús (1942) – considered one of his greatest works, and which proves his skillful grasp of the Spanish language -, Rusiñol y su tiempo (1942), El pintor Joaquín Mir (1944), Un señor de Barcelona (1945) and La huida del tiempo (1945).
The first volume was an unpublished work, El quadern gris, a book of notable events initially written when he was only a little over 20 years of age (although rewritten and substantially expanded later).
It was translated into Spanish as El cuaderno gris by Dionisio Ridruejo (in collaboration with his wife, Gloria de Ros)[2] and into English as The Gray Notebook by Peter Bush.