The Temporada Alta festival will enter for the first time in the cathedral of Girona with a dramatized reading of the Confessions of Saint Augustine by the actor Joan Carreras. For the interpreter it is a text “very current” because of the way the saint and philosopher approaches his entire inner world, despite having been written 1,600 years ago.
Born in the year 354 in the Roman province of Numidia, in present-day Algeria, Augustine of Hippo knew how to unite the Greco-Roman culture in which he was educated with the Judeo-Christian thought to which he approached in adulthood.
“The preparation of this assembly has been a discovery”, assures Carreras, who will give the reading in the temple on Friday (20.00) and Sunday (19.00) and will repeat it in Barcelona in November, as part of the Clàssics festival.
For Carreras, who did not know the work of Agustí d’Hypona, working on the text “have not been sessions of rehearsal, but of discovery and decoding, to understand it in the deepest sense”. He assures that it is “very current as he arrives at a concept as complex as God from curiosity and wisdom». “He is not an imposed god, he is a very worked and reasoned god”, he considers.
The writer and translator Raül Garrigassait, who has been in charge of condensing the autobiography of the African sage into an hour, assesses that it is a “unique and fascinating” text, of a “very high literary level” and which, moreover, served to pave the way for the later literary traditionfor example with autobiographies.
For Garrigassait, the Confessions they change the way of perceiving the human condition, because the author “understands that A person’s life is not simply the external facts such as wars and battles or abstract ideas, but also the history of internal, passionate and philosophical conflicts.’
“He talks about human interiority in a close way, which connects with the worship that currently exists in the interior life”, points out Garrigassait, who affirms that “Agustí d’Hipona uses interior analysis to reach transcendence, to look outside”, he says.
Maintain “philosophical density”
For the adaptation, Garrigassait has relied on Miquel Dolç’s translation and, without rewriting the original, has tried to understand the entire biographical journey of the saint, from childhood to conversion and subsequent reflections .
However, he assures that has tried to ensure that the text “is not stripped of thought” and maintains “philosophical and reflective density” collecting the philosophical moments in which Augustine of Hippo raises new questions, such as the existence of evil.
According to the director of the festival, Salvador Sunyer, the commitment to an essential text of Christianity is motivated by the need to keep alive the thread that unites us to the classics“which must never be completely disconnected”, and at the same time, to “be aware” of the position that the Catholic tradition has in our culture.
As for the staging, Sunyer points out that it is not a show, but a reading, and that it is only about listening to Carreras “with a lectern and a lamp” in a setting as imposing as the cathedral.
As he details, he has been thinking about making such a proposal for more than a decade and had discussed it with Modest Prats, to whom the reading is dedicated.