Publicist and poet, Aribau (Barcelona 1798 – Barcelona 1862) studied rhetoric, philosophy and physics and made his literary debut with Ensayos poéticos (1817), a work breathing an Enlightenment spirit. At that time Aribau, who expressed dismay at the “shameful decadence in which Catalan literature finds itself today”, had already founded a “Philosophical Society” (1815-21) with like-minded spirits aspiring to become a literary force in the liberal climate which they expected to emerge. His intellectual development took him towards progressive liberalism and an interest in Romanticism. He founded a periodical entitled El Europeo in 1823, and undertook (unsuccessfully) to have the work of Walter Scott published in Spanish. In 1832 he wrote, in Catalan, the ode La patria.

Aribau’s participation in the revolution of 1820 launched him on a public career: he was given responsibilities in the administration and as a publicist in the Barcelona press. At the end of the three-year liberal period (1820-23), Aribau set up El Europeo (1823-24) with López Soler, Karl E. Cook and the exiled Italians Fiorenzo Galli and Luigi Monteggia, who brought the influence of the Milanese Il Conciliatore to bear on the journal. El Europeo set about broadcasting the tenets of the Romantic school, and Aribau was particularly interested in publishing news on “what we [the Barcelona people] once were”. In 1826, Aribau settled in Madrid in the employ of a Catalan trader and financier; he continued to work as a publicist, now in the Madrid press, and, in 1841, his name was put forward for several positions in the state administration.

During his years in Madrid, Aribau became an important member of the Catalan industrial lobby, with considerable prestige in economic and administrative issues. He spent his final years working on Historia de la producción, del consumo y del impuesto en España (“History of production, consumption and taxation in Spain”), which was left unfinished. He also gained a reputation as a man of letters, largely as the result of the ambitious Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, which he co-founded in 1846 and of which he directed the first four volumes. Aribau used Catalan only in a few occasional and incidental poems. Unintentionally, one of these, La pàtria, made him a figure of enduring fame in modern Catalan literature. The poem was written in Madrid in 1832 as a private tribute to his employer and fellow-Catalan: it was this combination of addressee and topic (an evocation of their common country of origin) that induced Aribau to make use of Catalan at all. La pàtria describes his love for the fatherland in Romantic terms: through the use of Herderian tropes (such as the formative influence of language and history) the fatherland becomes a landscape of the soul, evoked from the pain of longing and brought alive through language. The poem makes numerous literary allusions; it opens with a passage from Manzoni’s I promessi sposi. It was published in 1833 in Barcelona, in El Vapor, accompanied by an editorial note stating that it was offered to readers “with the same patriotic pride as a Scotsman would present the verses of Sir Walter Scott to the inhabitants of his homeland”. La pàtria met with extraordinary esteem and within a few years came to be canonized as the incipience of the Catalan renaixença.