"As Catalan culture heads for its big moment in Germany [Frankfurt]: the closing of the Catalan mind", Financial Times

Porto uns quants dies fullejant la premsa exterior, ja que per primera vegada la tinc mes accessible. Des del cap de setmana passat he fullejat un parell de vegades el New York Times, un parell el Wall Street Journal i el Financial Times del cap de setmana passat i del present. Podria comentar moltes coses, pero m'agradaria comentar aquelles que poden impactar mes als que estan a l'altra banda de l'Atlantic.

Ni Catalunya ni Espanya han aparegut al New York Times cap vegada. Ni cap referencia indirecta. Res de res. Pel que fa al Wall Street Journal, vem apareixer com tambe en el Financial Times. Es tracta d'un anunci d'Endesa que vol donar explicacions sobre Acciona i Enel. Res mes al Wall Street Journal. Pel que fa al Financial Times, sembla que els britanics ens tracten. L'edicio passada del Financial Times sortien dues fantastiques cases a la Costa Brava en venda i pisos al costat de la casa Batllo. El d'aquest cap de setmana anava menys carregat d'anuncis inmobiliaris espanyols, pero finalment sembla que aquest cap de setmana tocava escriure del pais vei i de Catalunya. Apareixia la frase que Rodrigo Rato, ex-ministre d'Economia d'Espanya deixava el lloc al socialista frances al FMI, aixi com tambe el tipic article inmobiliari que posa al mateix calaix el sector inmobiliari espanyol amb el bulgar. Com que segurament el cap de setmana que ve tornaran a comentar el desastre inmobiliari espanyol, ja ho comentare la setmana que ve.

En l'apartat de cultura i llibres, apareix un article que deixa els catalans com uns fantastics fonamentalistes. Val molt la pena l'article. Te una clara visio tendenciosa dels catalans a la fira del llibre de Frankfurt. Aquest tipus d'articles son els que valen, no el que diuen els politics sobre el que ells fan i diuen a l'exterior. Aquest es l'article que llegeix el mon dels catalans: a disfrutar-lo!

P.D. La part en blau, no ha sortit publicada al diari, sino que esta en la versio electronica. Recomano llegir amb tranquilitat, ja que es poden veure les clares diferencies entre el que ha sortit publicat i no en l'edicio paper. La tendenciositat es molt gran. La part en vermell es la mes impactant.



Quixotic row over Frankfurt: who speaks for Barcelona?
By Julius Purcell
Published: September 28 2007 17:13 Last updated: September 28 2007 17:13

In one celebrated episode in Don Quixote, the knight-errant enters a publishing house in

Barcelona where the staff are busy printing the exploits of a certain Don Quixote of La Mancha. There is solid authorial self-interest behind the quip: Cervantes knew the port city and its prosperous book trade well, and as it turned out, the first one-volume edition of the Quixote really was published in Barcelona.

Fast forward to now, and Cervantes’s self-referential joke takes on darker levels of irony here. Barcelona acts as two capitals: on one hand, the historic capital of Spain’s publishing industry, and on the other, of a fiercely separatist Catalonia whose very identity is vested in the Catalan language. In two weeks’ time this odd duality is to be played out at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Catalan Culture is to be guest of honour.

“The debate surrounding region and nation preoccupies people at present, particularly in Europe,” says Marife Boix, the book fair’s vice-president, who explains that the annual guest platform tends “sometimes to stir things up”. By all accounts, this is precisely what it has done: Barcelona politicians have excluded the language of Cervantes from the party, decreeing that “Catalan culture” can only be that written in Catalan. The result is a bitter literary row that has laid bare raw tensions in this bilingual city.

Spanish-language writer Carlos Ruíz Zafón, author of The Shadow of The Wind, the blockbuster novel about his native Barcelona, has attacked the nationalist ideology behind this year’s guest programme; another author has decried its “nationalist brutality”. Meanwhile, in the Catalan-only camp, all this is so much sour grapes: an inability to accept that this proud tongue, so persecuted by Franco, can finally emerge from the shadow of Spanish and claim its due.
Everyone agrees that the term “Catalan literature” would have left no ambiguity – but in this long-running debate certainties have foundered on the official designation, “culture”.

Enter Josep Bargalló, senior Catalan nationalist politician, and the debate immediately turns bitter. Taking the reins of the Frankfurt committee last year, Bargalló never hid his belief that “Catalan culture is that written in Catalan”. Nevertheless, under pressure in June, Bargalló invited the leading Spanish-language writers to come on the official delegation to Frankfurt. One by one they declined, “honourably” ceding their place to Catalan writers. Or at least this was the official version. The Shadow of the Wind’s Ruíz Zafón painted a different picture to the press: of “political commissars” interested only in “the image of Catalonia they want to project to their own Catalan constituents, the real audience of this whole sideshow”.

Antoni Comas is a man for whom this is anything but a sideshow. President of the Catalan Publishers’ Association, he represents more than 250 local publishers, producing 60 per cent of all books in Spain, with sales of €1.6bn ($2.3bn). Comas throws his hands up in despair at what he sees as a lost opportunity. “I am so sad about Frankfurt. To me, it’s quite simple,” he says. “Catalan culture is all the written culture produced in Catalonia. This is not some idea of what Catalan identity is or isn’t, our business and the business of the Frankfurt Book Fair,” – he raps the table – “is to sell books!”

Comas’s criticism of Bargalló is startlingly candid. His “invitation” to the Spanish-language authors was, he says, soured by nationalist ideology: “I know the political party Bargalló belongs to. I know the way they were invited, and it was not done willingly.”
Several blocks down from Comas’s office, in the city’s 19th-century Eixample district, one can hear a rather different version of events.

Isabel Martí is director of the Catalan-language publisher La Campana. On her list she has Albert Sanchez Piñol, whose creepy novel Cold Skin (published in the UK by Canongate) is one of the big success stories of Catalan-language literature. To Martí, the Frankfurt row is a “false controversy” whipped up by anti-Catalan elements. “The success of Cold Skin irritates the power structures, the Spanish media and the big publishing companies ... It is a part of all this hate that is still coming from the past!”

Sitting at the same table, nodding and interjecting, is another of La Campana’s writers, Josep Maria Espinas. Author of the hymn of Barça football club, Espinas wrote alongside many of the great Catalan authors in the Franco years, when Catalan was still published semi-clandestinely. He deplores the perception of Catalan as a newcomer: “It has been the everyday language here for centuries! In 1502 there was a Catalan-German dictionary, that’s how established it was. But Madrid can’t recognise this!”

At 80, Espinas is wiry and vigorous, his voice hoarse with emotion. Every year, he says, the big Barcelona publishers take their Spanish authors to Frankfurt; this year, he argues, it is only right that Catalan plays the guest, because it is its one big chance to spread its wings as a literary culture.

“All we want to do is say: we are here. But every time a Catalan says this, we’re told: ‘Oh! You are against Spain.’ Our position is immediately radicalised.”

One Barcelona author who consistently complains that Catalan culture has indeed become radicalised is novelist Felix de Azúa. Poet, lecturer and columnist for the Spanish daily El País, de Azúa insists his problem “is not promotion of the Catalan language, which I heartily favour, but the negative treatment in Catalonia of Spanish”. Catalan TV soaps score cheap laughs by stereotyping Spanish-speakers as “ignorant, illiterate and crude – yet a majority of us here in Catalonia use Spanish in our everyday lives”.

Invited to join the Frankfurt party, de Azúa refused point blank. “No I did not want to go, absolutely not. To be used as some poster for the nationalists, and then be sent back to the ghetto! I can just imagine how unpleasant it would be in Frankfurt: the nationalists really are brutal.”

Strikingly different literary Barcelonas emerge from this quarrel. Comas remembers a city that, despite the dictatorship, was vibrant and outward-looking. “García Marquez and others came here and felt at home,” he recalls, “because we were a Latin city, but one that, unlike Madrid, was a window on to Europe.” Yet if de Azúa fears that these glory days are over and Barcelona’s cultural status is being destroyed by ethnocrats, to Isabel Martí the city’s past was nothing but a repression from which it is only now emerging.

As Catalan culture heads for its big moment in Germany, it will carry two irreconcilable versions of itself: the closing of the Catalan mind, and its triumphant opening up to the world.

The Frankfurt Book Fair runs from October 10-14

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007