Pola Oloixarac's Dark Constellations: A Review

Pola Oloixarac, Dark Constellations (New York: Soho Press, 2019). 202 pages. Translated by Roy Kesey.

Remember Donald Rumsfeld’s words to the press twenty years ago, in 2002? ‘[…] as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.’ These latter ones are the scary ones, I guess. The Incas contemplated dark constellations in the night skies, where the dark spaces (the unknowns) were the object of interest rather than the bright, visible known points, the stars.

Argentine Pola Oloixarac weaves three stories into an unusual, weird and at times a little clumsy volume. The first part is set in the late 19^th century: explorer Niklas Bruun ventures into caves on some Atlantic island. While in search for some hallucinogenic stuff that would allegedly erase whatever it is that separates one species from others, he and his group become the more-than-willing prisoners of a tribe whose women profusely engage in sexual intercourse with the visitors.

The second part has an enough promising start – it is truly hilarious and Oloixarac proves she does have the skill. An Argentine student travels to Brazil and gets pregnant. Her son is Cassio, who will become a notorious hacker and will eventually be hired by a big corporation with less than clearly defined aims and purposes. Governments and corporations seem engaged in a race to discover the way they would be able to capture our DNA either by means of real samples or using strange, ever-present instruments that resemble facial-recognition devices called Bionoses. Everyone, be careful where you fart! Your DNA might be collected and used against your will.

The final part brings in Piera, an Argentine biologist. It is set in just a couple of years’ time. She teams up with Cassio in an obscure plot to develop viruses and plant them across the whole world via the web.

The author seems to focus strongly on big issues, no doubt: where are we heading as Humanity? And what might be the consequences of blending the human and the technological in the context of a world where all of our data has fast become merchandise for sale? Scary, yes. The unknown unknowns!

Whatever might be uniting the goal of Bruun’s travels and Cassio and Piera’s heavily marijuana-induced plans to, well, do something that I found mind-boggling and pretty obscure, I may have missed. If Dark Constellations is intended to terrify us about where evolution is taking us, perhaps a little less vagueness and darkness would help. Lots of references to computer developments and popular culture of the 90s and later do not help us much to follow the scanty plot the book offers.

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening: A Review

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening (London: Faber & Faber, 2020 [2018]). 282 pages. Translated into English by Michele Hutchison.

Fundamentalism is but another deadly disease, and despite science and what appears to be human progress over the centuries, it is quite clear that the virus of zealotry and fanaticism continues to spread everywhere. Even in a village of the Netherlands, where ten-year-old Jas Mulder lives with her parents and three siblings, two males (Matthies, the eldest, and Obbe) and one sister, Hanna. The Mulders own a dairy farm, they’re actually poor and struggle to make a profit.

Two days before Christmas, Matthies puts in his skates and goes to the other side of the frozen lake that separates their farm from the village. He has an accident, falling through the ice and drowning. What until then had been a less than pleasant existence becomes quite a hell for Jas and Hanna. Life quickly degrades as the parents lose themselves in their grief and neglect the children, who are basically left to fend for themselves in their daily struggle. Hanna dreams of leaving the place for good. Jas thinks her mum is hiding a group of Jews in the basement. Obbe is a sadistic torturer of animals and at night compulsively strikes his forehead against the bedframe. What hope can there be for them?

Ice Skater by Axel Ender

The story is told by Jas, who is extremely observant and descriptive where smells, textures and shapes are concerned. Filth is omnipresent: the manure from the cows, the cheese they make, the dirty undies and pyjamas as Jas continually pees in her sleep. To make matters worse, she starts suffering from constipation, an issue her father attempts to sort out by inserting a piece of soap up her anus. In the meantime, her mother decides it is best not to eat anything at all.

Jas begins her story by telling the reader that she has stopped taking her coat off. After Matthies’ death, her sorrow is immense, for he treated her with a kindness and affection no other male in the family seems capable of. However, she is shocked into fear when told by her parents not to say his name.

But of course, there is the Church on Sundays. In her narrative, Jas repeatedly quotes passages from the Bible. Her parents are insanely devout, to the extent that their religion has somehow been transformed into a punitive code. Everything is seen as sinful, and the children’s numerous sins must be punished with brutality, of course. They probably wonder, in the wake of the loss of their eldest son, how come there is no sign of grace from the Saviour?

Gloomy, grim and dark. Not a happy place. A church in the Netherlands.

But then comes the plague, too, in the form of foot-and-mouth disease. Every single cow and calf will be put down; the Mulders have now lost what little they had. Both parents have seriously lost their marbles, and threats to leave the farm and abandon the family are voiced but never carried out.

This is more than a novel on people’s inability to express their grief. Rijneveld constructs a plausible narrator who is innocent in her brutality yet enchantingly ironic in her explorations of adolescent sexuality and the imaginative load she bears in her desperate attempts to escape sadness, neglect and self-blame. You may read the views of other reviewers who appear to recoil at the scatological episodes involving excrements, sperm, blood or even tools being stuck in inappropriate bodily orifices. Some readers, I daresay, need to grow up a bit and test the world out there. Imagination never bites.

A good book, a great story and a new author from whom we should expect more in the near future. Michele Hutchison’s English translation, The Discomfort of Evening, received the Booker International Prize in 2020.

Estic escoltant/ Estoy escuchando/ I'm listening to... (1)

Today I bought this song. More relevant than ever.
M'he comprat aquest tema perquè em sembla més rellevant que no mai abans.

Cambios / Changes

What a shame people will not value

What they never fought for, yet they own. How sad

To see the faces of people who are lied to,

And trust their lot will improve

Yet this country has always been blind

There will be no Mar Menor or old age pensions

Immigrants are still called criminals

But in the football field they celebrate their goals

Get fined for smoking a relaxing weed
“Got nothin’ on me, get stuffed, Officer!”
He’s enraging the kids in the park
On the same might when a homeless man gets punched

The mobile phone won’t help me interact
But make me hate myself more, it’ll be too late
I want a planet that does represent me
It matters who I can count on, not the money they can count

Been waiting so long my hopes for the world to change

Have gone cold, but this will not change

We keep arguing while poverty increases

Give him more tobacco, get yourself a throat cancer

The Princess is well protected but not your daughter

Who will have to eat stale bread if the economy goes to the dogs

It is hard to bring food to the table

And there are those who bash their partner

Die, sonofabitch, die in jail

Like my head, in an eternal trip

While I’m driving, I gaze at the landscape

It looks sad, just like when you left

The 21^st century, that’s our lot

Of the best life ever, the one we have not looked after

What we neither deserve nor appreciate

We get carried away, we have settled for this

I used think that is what people cared about

To be able to breathe, polluted waters

People have been duped, they feel frustration

In Barcelona they have set up the barricades

Rocks fly over, dumpsters get burned
Yet the media have never had it better
You are the ones who have caused this hatred that is eating us up
The TVs are the ones winning this war

I’m the sole owner of my freedoms

When I have to I do my duties

I have no nation, I follow no colours

I’m not a thief like the Society of Authors

We’re up in the air, enjoy the trip

I carried no luggage, wasn’t in first class

Only the working class I brought along

They may vanquish me, but not my message!

A family evicted is a shame

While the banks own so many empty flats

Surviving on charity

And kneeling down before Felipe and Juan Carlos

Changes, I just want changes

But this is an uneducated, antiquated country

Replete with selfish people and low wages

Full of racists and corrupt officials

They hold the reins of your life

The planet suffers because of the food you need

Your belly’s already full

Breathe in this smoke and enjoy your exhaustion

Advocating that the innocent stay in jail

Is like advocating that the guilty remain free

People should get closer to each other

Peoples who do not know each other go into battle

Yet another day I get up apathetic

Knackered, hungover and anxious

I hold my head high with what my lot is

I try to contribute because that’s what I’ve been taught

They pay lip service to the Constitution

Though half of those who voted for it are now dead

In this country they want respect for the rules

But a dead man keeps ruling in the shade

Think about it

Just think about it

A political trial - Suso de Toro

The Supreme Court. Photograph by F.D.V.

A political trial, by Suso de Toro

The Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Span is to judge a group of men and women who have neither robbed nor hurt nor killed anyone. They are all peaceful persons; yet the Spanish Justice detained, handcuffed and put them away in cells, where they have been kept for over a year. The actions they are to be tried for are related to their exercising political freedoms and their freedom of expression. They are all outstanding community representatives and leaders, democratically-elected by the Catalan voters. For the same reason, the Justice system tried to arrest other Catalan politicians abroad.

There is no doubt this is a political issue and it is therefore a political hearing. The charges are extremely serious. It is a very serious political trial. As political trials go, this one is the elephant in the room.

The ultimate goal for this situation to occur is a plan: to put an end to Catalan nationalism. However, its inevitable outcome is the self-portrait the Spanish State painted of itself, appearing on the world stage as a State that persecutes democratic freedoms, as the successor of the Francoist regime.

No, it is not true that Catalan nationalism has awakened Francoist nationalism; Catalans are not to blame. No, it is not true that the dreadful current image of Spain in the world is the fault of those treacherous Catalans. What was known as "sociological Francoism" had political ingredients: all it was needed was for someone to decide to stir the pot and take the lead.

Specifically, the conflict began when M. Rajoy’s People’s Party gathered 4.2 million signatures against the Catalans’ Statute and the appeal lodged before the Constitutional Court against it. The central government and the State’s institutions have wielded maximum power in such a conflict, as they’ve shown in spades, and were mainly responsible for taking an artificially-created political conflict to the current situation. It is the State and the economic powers who have chosen to have these persons treated in such a way. Humiliation, the sadism of power.

Because this State’s policy of refusing to engage in a dialogue, so as to corner the opposition and persecute them harshly, has involved either actively or passively every Spanish political party and every state institution, starting with the King. It is this policy that lays the charges against and keeps these persons in jail. The nature of this post-Francoist State is unabashedly apparent, and it is expressed through the indictment: the national Prosecutor’s Office, the State’s Legal Counsel and Vox. The ideological elements of the charges are very obvious, as is the ideology of the Deep State.

What is frightful is not that the State behaves as per its nature, but that there is no democratic response from the population. It is probably too late.

The original text in Spanish can be found here.

Esperança Camps' Naufragi a la neu: A Review

Esperança Camps, Naufragi a la neu (Alzira: Bromera, 2011). 214 pages.

Fortunately for us readers, literature has endless possibilities for mirror games. When re-creating a creation produces reflections as varied and meaningful as those produced by Camps’ skilful narrative technique in this novel, Naufragi a la neu [literally, Wreck in the snow, although an alternative translation for the title could be Failure in the snow] the result can be delightfully playful.

Take Cristina, a youngish ex-drug addict who was rescued from the squalor and wretchedness her life had become by a charitable middle-aged woman, Teresa, in an ugly, tacky Mediterranean city on the east coast of the Iberian Peninsula no one can fail to recognise: my home town, Valencia. For reasons we are never completely told (Camps can also conveniently leave gaps where appropriate) Teresa saves Cristina from herself and probably from a certain and premature death, too. They become an item in more senses than one, and in time Teresa will give her young paramour an education. Cristina embraces literature while disengaging herself from all the vices and substances that used to be part of her bodily fluids, and just before their breakup she is invited to go to a writers’ retreat in the mountains.

The place has been snowed in: it should be an ideal situation for her fresh talent to flourish. The main character of the novel she is writing is Paco el Moix: an ex-convict, Paco survives in an all too familiar jungle of poverty and drug deals. The man has no scruples and will stop at nothing just to get a few euros with which to buy the next dose. When he the opportunity to do a big job come his way (a bank robbery in a small town), he does not hesitate to join two gun-toting Slavic thugs who treat him with absolute contempt. Will they succeed in getting away with the money?

It’s raining and I’m the woman in the wide-brimmed hat who is reviewing some papers and travels in Compartment C, Car 193 by Edward Hopper, who always painted loneliness. The thick, viscous unsought for loneliness that falls on your eyelids and corrodes your spirit. So many book covers have been illustrated with Hopper’s unreal atmospheres! I am who I want to be, and I know I’m fleeing. (p. 1, my translation) Image sourced from www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=9758

If this were the whole plot of the novel, the book would have never seen the light of day. But because this is not what Naufragi a la neu is about, the reading is far more interesting than simply crime fiction. Camps presents the reader with three parallel texts. The first one is Cristina’s journal, where she confesses her fears, her aspirations, her miseries. The second one is the story Cristina is writing about Paco el Moix, which hardly ever goes for too long and is cleverly and frequently interrupted by a third voice, that produced by an anonymous narrator, who makes it first appearance in brackets, interrupting Cristina’s crime story.

Cristina’s stay at the mountain retreat eventually becomes some sort of mirror where she will need to confront the reality of her personal failure. Is Cristina the product of the narrator’s imagination? Or is the “narrator”, the intrusive narrative voice that nudges his/her way into the text the product of Cristina’s imagination (as Cristina appears to suggest in her journal)? Or are they all the result of yet another creator working at a higher level? Is it Teresa perhaps? Or Esperança Camps? We will never know because we are never told.

The metaliterary game played by Camps is remarkably thought-provoking. Towards the end of the robbery story, Cristina shows pity for Paco el Moix, whom she would have liked to kill in her fiction since she could not do so in real life. Was the narrator’s influence on this narratological choice determined by his/her affection for Cristina? Do these decisions mirror each other?

A story within a story is given an even wider narrative framework through the disruptive intervention of the anonymous narrator: “(this is not the way, I know, I’ve got no excuse to barge into the text Cristina’s writing, I’ve got no reason to do so, it’s one of the basic rules of the profession: our presence in the novel must not be noticed, but since I’ve already breached the precept of invisibility so many times, one more will hardly matter; I’ll make the most of the darkness in this room now that she’s gone down to supper and has left her laptop on, it looks like she intends to keep on writing when she comes back upstairs, that’s a good sign; oh, how I hate waltz! This one I can hear now, too, this one by Hans Christian Lumbye, so fat, with an insufferable moustache, the music he wrote seems to me too slimy… I’m going around in circles, I’m moving the cursor up and down because I know what I’m about to write is reckless, because I know I can’t sneak into Cristina’s novel to say that, despite my initial reticence, I like this woman, there, I’ve said it, I like Cristina, head over heels, there, it’s written, it makes me happy to hear her by my side, adjusting the pace of our thoughts, to think up what she writes, I like her so much! Even though I am no one, I don’t have any feelings, I don’t have any feelings? How can I write without feelings? I should not have written the word ‘feelings’ three times, and that one makes it four, it is an unnecessary reiteration, and now I need to write that I don’t have an identity, nor any need to love or be loved, that I’m just a simple narrator…) [p. 111, my translation].

Naufragi a la neu was awarded the 31^st Blai Bellver Prize for Fiction, and I believe it was thoroughly deserved.

Xavier Aliaga's Dos metres quadrats de sang jove - A Review

Xavier Aliaga, Dos metres quadrats de sang jove (Barcelona: Alrevès, 2014). 187 pages.

It is rather regrettable that the name of my home town has become synonymous with insufferable levels of political corruption. Valencia is the setting for this short crime nouvelle by Xavier Aliaga. The protagonist is detective Feliu Oyono, a Catalan-speaking policeman of African ancestry, who is quite obsessed with sex and the female body.

I may be picking at straws here, but one of Chandler’s commandments for writing good crime fiction says that the novel needs to be “realistic in character, setting and atmosphere”, and should deal with “real people in a real world”. Far be it from me to rule out the possibility that a black Valencian-born policeman exists. Anyone would most likely agree with me that such a fictitious character is less than likely to speak and write the local language the way Oyono does, though.

Against a background of dirty play and internecine wars within the ultraconservative political party in government – the PP is never mentioned, but the references are obvious – Oyono and his assistant Amalia Vigarany must find out who killed a young idealist journo called Manel.

Manel is (was) one of the founders of a web-based investigative newspaper, La ciutat digital. Their reports denouncing the ever-present corruption networks and the misappropriation of public funds (in this sense, Aliaga cannot be accused of making up too much!) have already earned them the wrath of ruling politicians and senior bureaucrats. One night while he’s alone at the newspaper offices someone whose face is covered with a balaclava breaks in and slashes his throat in one swift, highly ‘professional’ cut. Manel’s colleagues are naturally quite devastated.

Feliu Oyono and Amalia interrogate the journalists but find nothing much – they all seem to get along quite well. Yet setting up a newspaper from scratch is neither easy nor cheap, so they decide direct their detective skills towards the source of the funding that has made La ciutat digital possible. What they find is that Enric, co-founder and rival to Manel for the sexual favours of the only female reporter, has been receiving monies from an obscure company based in Buenos Aires. What is really going on?

It appears that Manel and Enric were not on such amicable terms anymore when the former was murdered while typing on his keyboard and bled to death, leaving two square metres of young blood on the office floor. Oyono and Amalia turn the screws on him but it all seems to be a red herring: they might not like each other that much, but that should be no reason to murder your former friend and colleague. Or should it?

In the end, the reason Manel was savagely murdered happens to be quite unrelated to the murky financing he had been arguing about with the co-founder of the newspaper. The plot meanders rather aimlessly: Aliaga throws in the story of Amalia’s affair with a radical Basque youth while she was serving in Navarre. Its inclusion seems rather unwarranted, and given how short Dos metres quadrats de sang jove actually is, the reader may wonder about its purpose.

The novella’s structure is developed mostly by means of monologues. At times this works, but other times replacing dialogue with dramatic monologues feels too artificial. The inclusion of blog posts written by Manel before his death and later released as they had been programmed by the deceased journalist adds some spice. But Aliaga is at his best when he lets the characters speak. His dialogues can be witty, lively, full of force and irony:

- Listen very carefully, you son of a bitch! Why should we believe an impostor? ‘Oooh! We’re a persecuted media! Manel has paid with his life for the work we do unveiling corruption! Me! Me! Me! It could have been me! Why haven’t they come after me? I cannot sleep thinking about all this!’… Do you think we’re stupid?

- I… I haven’t said that… What I believe is that you’re going the wrong way about this. Neither Alberola nor anyone around him knew that Manel had found out about the scam. I hid that information, I wasn’t interested, please believe me, I was certain Manel would let it go to the keeper… The thing with his blog has taken us by surprise.

- And how can you be so sure Albarola didn’t know?

- He would’ve told me. Like all politicians, he’s a bit paranoid.

- And now you’ll tell me, you piece of shit, that you’ve had no contact with him since Manel’s death, that you’ve told him it’s over.

- No, I’ll tell you the truth, we spoke at length. Alberola was amazed, he was shocked. And very worried, too. He said that maybe we had lost our grip on things, that some of his rivals hadn’t taken in the issue too well. I think he was being truthful. He’s a very ambitious pollie, he’ll go to any lengths to crush those who bother him, but I don’t think he’s capable of such an atrocity, to be honest.

- And how did he intend to handle the situation?

- He asked not to meet with us again for a long while and to fuel the conspiracy theory from La Ciutat. To do that for a few months and wait until the storm cleared up… But it will not clear up… And I can’t take this anymore, I’m on edge…

- You’re lucky we’re not at the station, ‘cause I’d give you another kind of edge over there. You know what I think, arsehole? That you told everything to your friend the minister in order to protect your grubby deal. In the best of cases, you washed your hands of it, you played dumb, ‘whatever will be, will be’, you thought. And I also think you had another reason not to be concerned about what might happen to Manel: you have never been able to swallow the fact that Empar preferred him, that she was still in love with a man without your physique, without your charisma, but with so big a brain and so big a heart that the office was not big enough for him. An honest, upright person. The opposite of you, you piece of shit, you filthy sewer rat. Know that we’ll go all the way, you’re up to your neck in shit, you retard…

- That’s enough, Amalia.

- Did you get it, you bastard? We’ll get you!

- For fuck’s sake, Amalia! That’s enough, I said! (p. 139-141, my translation)

Had Aliaga worked further with the manuscript (which incidentally contains some typos in the few Spanish passages it includes) Dos metres quadrats… would have probably increased its length and its literary attractiveness. As it stands, it is a rather lame specimen of crime fiction, its shortcomings outnumbering its virtues.

Reseña: Frog, de Mo Yan

Mo Yan, Frog (Melbourne: Penguin, 2014). 388 páginas. Traducido al inglés del mandarín por Howard Goldblatt.

Para alguien como yo, nacido en medio de la explosión natalicia de la década de los 1960 en la España desarrollista del régimen del dictador fascista, en una época en la que los periódicos reseñaban todos los años la concesión del Premio de Natalidad a alguna familia con ocho, nueve o incluso más retoños, la política de la China comunista de limitar las familias a un solo hijo resultaba no solo totalmente ajena, era algo también extraordinario.

La principal protagonista de la última novela del Premio Nobel (y la primera que he leído) es Gugu, la tía del narrador Wan Zu/Xiaopao (cuyo apodo es Renacuajo), quien en su juventud aprendió las artes y pericias del oficio de comadrona. Tras la adopción de la política de limitación del número de hijos por familia (por el bien de la patria, nos recuerda Gugu en numerosísimas ocasiones) se convierte en la principal ejecutora de esa política en la pequeña comunidad rural del noreste de China en la que vive. Y Gugu lleva a cabo su cometido de manera absolutamente implacable.

Mo Yan no escamotea los detalles brutales en algunos episodios en los que mujeres embarazadas son perseguidas y sacadas a la fuerza de sus casas o escondites y obligadas a someterse a abortos pese a su avanzado estado de gestación (como es el caso de la mujer del narrador, que muere desangrada en el quirófano del hospital) y al escarnio cruel y humillación pública.

Frog relata la vida de Renacuajo desde su infancia en los años 60 hasta los inicios del presente siglo, siempre con la presencia de la figura dominante de Gugu, tenaz miembro del Partido y defensora a ultranza de las políticas demográficas del gobierno.

Mo Yan emplea además una atractiva técnica narrativa. Frog está dividida en cinco partes, cada una precedida por una carta que Renacuajo, que no deja de ser un diletante literario, envía a un admirado profesor japonés. En un principio nos hace saber que está escribiendo una obra de teatro sobre la vida de su tía Gugu, pero la obra no aparece hasta el final de la novela. Cada una de las cartas va acompañada del extenso relato que hace Renacuajo de las diferentes épocas en su vida y de los eventos y sucesos que les afectaron a todos los miembros de su familia y de su comunidad.

Las hambrunas, las represiones políticas de la Revolución Cultural, los rápidos cambios experimentados por China tras la apertura comercial de finales de los años 90: todo forma de esta atractiva novela, que ha sido excelentemente traducida por Howard Goldblatt. En efecto, es una estupenda traducción que no merece el quebranto de algunos flagrantes errores de edición como estos dos: “There couldn’t have been more then ten wristwatches” (p. 32), y “a man who’s wife was pregnant with their fourth child” (p. 123). Una editorial tan prestigiosa como Penguin debe cuidar mejor no solo su imagen sino sus productos.

Vista de Jinan, una de las ciudades de Shandong. Fotografía de Qquchn. 

Mo Yan transmite sutilmente la enorme presión psicológica a la que el aparato político del régimen comunista somete a los ciudadanos a través de individuos totalmente entregados a su cometido, como es el caso de Gugu. El autor tampoco escatima en humor, creando variadas situaciones y episodios que rozan la farsa y el esperpento. En su mira están los oficiales corruptos y los avariciosos empresarios de la China más actual. Tras la asombrosa transformación económica de China (¿Acaso alguien duda de que será la primera potencia económica antes de 2050?) solamente los pobres siguen sujetos a las reglas, pues los ricos pueden permitirse pagar las multas, un dinero que le viene muy bien a la administración.

Goldblatt se esfuerza por verter al inglés los juegos de palabras del original. La palabra ‘rana’ en mandarín tiene una pronunciación muy similar al llanto de un niño, además de ser homófona con una antiquísima diosa de la fertilidad. Pero la fobia que Gugu siente por los batracios es una de las cuestiones que, en mi opinión, peor quedan plasmadas en la novela.

Una de las interrogantes que me quedan sin respuesta es en qué medida Mo Yan logra saltarse la férrea censura del régimen de Beijing. El subtexto es, ocasionalmente, tremendamente irónico, mas la impresión que queda tras la lectura de Frog es una de indefinición. En todo caso, su lectura merece la pena.

Scorched Language Policy, by Enric Sòria

Scorched language policy

Enric Sòria

On 21 January the termination of Catalunya Ràdio broadcasts into the Valencian Country (País Valencià) added insult to the injury as the Catalan TV3 has been banned and the local TV and Radio Canal 9 were both shut down. In the words of Vicent Climent’s, spokesperson for the Vice-chancellors of Valencian universities, as of today “there is no audiovisual broadcaster, whether public or private, covering the whole of the country’s territory broadcasting in our own language”. This is a very serious matter. Apart from a handful of municipal broadcasters, in a very short time the language of the Valencian people has lost its presence in the most influential mainstream media, radio and TV.

The Deputy Leader of the Valencian Government (Generalitat), José Císcar, has claimed his government has nothing against Catalunya Ràdio, but that it is against illegal broadcasting – that is, against the signal being received here in the País Valencià. The illegality occurs mainly because the government has for decades done their best to make it illegal, as they did with TV3, by hindering any possible sensible solution to the issue. However, there are at present about 300 radio stations in the País Valencià in either an illegal status or a legal loophole, yet none of them have been silenced. No leniency has been shown to Catalunya Ràdio. Mr Císcar also claimed that radio stations in the Valencian language can obviously exist in the País Valencià only, where the language is spoken. By the same token, if Spain is the country where Spanish is spoken, Latin American books, films and TV series should have been banned, as it is not possible for them to be in the very same language as that spoken by Spaniards. When it is about the Spanish world, the Popular Party know perfectly well that borders and states are one thing, but languages are another. But accepting the fact that Catalans and Balearics speak the language spoken by Valencians, just like a denizen of, say, Teulada in Alacant? NO WAY! One feels such arguments are but examples taken straight out of the Bad-Faith Book – which in José Císcar’s case is not at all impossible – and the issue here has been to switch our own language off the radio.

Doubtful arguments were proffered in the case of Canal 9, too. The Generalitat Premier himself, Alberto Fabra, asserted it was necessary to close down the broadcaster, in order to avoid shutting down schools. Yet schools have been closed down all the same, most particularly those schools that offered tuition in Valencian. That is to say: no TV, no radio, and increasingly less education in the local language. This is the way our government complies with the constitutional mandate of rendering special respect and protection to the native languages in every autonomous community. For a very long time now, the kind of respect and protection the Generalitat renders the local language has by far no correspondence elsewhere in Spain. That is why our country is the only one where the use of the local language keeps decreasing. Just the opposite of what is happening to our language in Catalonia or the Balearic Islands (or in Galicia, the Basque Country and Navarre with their respective local languages). It is here and only here where the language is evidently becoming an endangered language; this situation is absolutely the government’s doing. But recently, the mistreatment that the language of the Valencian people suffers at the hands of our own institutions has worsened. It must also be pointed out that the Popular Party has recently begun a process whereby the Balearic Islands are fast being deprived of the common language, using the very same methods we are accustomed to here, and also in the area Aragon where our language is spoken – where, it needs to be reminded, our language has been officially reduced to a miserable acronym.

Thus, it is necessary to ask ourselves what our language has done to these people. Why do they have this fixation with the language, to the extent that they have obliterated it from the audiovisual map of the country and seem intent on wiping it out from schools and elsewhere? There are those who suspect this hastened campaign of de-valencianising the country is a reaction against the growth of the Catalan push for sovereignty. Once the language has been eradicated, the separatist virus will also be neutralised. It is not unthinkable that something like this might be the case (with these people, one must not discard any options). While we have been speaking Valencian for centuries, it is evident that the pro-independence option amongst us has been supported by a negligible minority. Moreover, the marginalisation, suppression and the various endeavours to achieve the eradication of the language occurred much earlier than these recent political trends. There has to be something deeper to the contempt and fierce dislike they show for our language. Why does it annoy them so much? A possible explanation is that, in the notion of Spain these people have had their brains engraved with – an idea diametrically opposed to the Swiss model – languages that according to the Constitution deserve respect and protection should in fact not exist at all, and the sooner they become extinct, the better. One language, one nation. This is the idea they have in their mugs. The Valencian branch has proven it can out-Herod Herod; it must be acknowledged that their tenacity and efficiency are extraordinary. They don’t need the language, and therefore they stifle it.

The original article can be found here.

L'aiguadolç

My very dear friend (and cousin) Juli has sent me several copies of L’aiguadolç 41, which includes a brief anthology of poems by Canberra’s poet Geoff Page that I have translated into Catalan. The anthology is preceded by a short introductory note analysing Page’s long career and his very humble poetics.

L’aiguadolç is a (now yearly) literary journal published by the Institut d’Estudis Comarcals de la Marina Alta. Issue 41 includes several articles on the interactions of literature and cinema by Enric Castelló, Jaume Silvestre, Joaquim Espinós, Isabel Marcillas Piquer and Aina Santamaria, plus an introduction by Joaquim Espinós; reviews and commentaries on Catalan literature by Carles Barquero Genovés, Carles Mulet, Josep Bertomeu Llop and Juli Capilla; three brand-new short stories by Lliris Picó and translations of eight poems by Geoff Page, published in English and Catalan side by side.

A very well presented volume, L’aiguadolç has now been around for many years. It is something close to a miracle that such a high quality publication has survived the onslaught of relentless political and financial harassment inflicted upon all cultural expressions by the far-right government that has regrettably ruled the Valencian country for so long.

Older issues can be downloaded gratis from: http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Aiguadolc/index

My favourite poem in this brief selection is ‘My father’s mirror’ [‘L’espill de mon pare’]. It speaks to me in ways most people should be able to understand.

L’espill de mon pare

Dos anys després

i afaitant-me davant l’espill de mon pare

hi veig la seua cara en la meua;

el mateix bulb pelat

que ens emmarca a tots dos

sempre ha estat implacable.

Un rostre

és ara cendres escampades

o un somriure tibant dins un marc;

l’altre

sent una navalla muda

que grata la pell.

Fixe el meu esguard

a través d’una finestra entelada

i hi veig mon pare, que em mira als ulls

una mica humit amb la condensació

i la mort mateixa podria ésser només

que el vidre s’entela.

mentre inesperadament,

el meu fill, amb catorze anys,

m’ha pillat des de la porta del bany

i amb sarcasme

per tan pura abstracció fa:

Xe, Papà, què estàs fent?

I aleshores es frega la galta

Tot just al lloc on una barba més

espera l’espill.

Resurrection, by Roberto Bolaño

Resurrection

Poetry enters a dream

Like a diver into a lake.

Poetry, braver than anyone else,

Enters and falls

Heavily

Into a lake, infinite like Loch Ness,

Or murky and ill-fated, like Lake Balaton.

Gaze at it from the bottom:

A diver

Innocent

Wrapped in the feathers

Of will.

Poetry enters a dream

Like a dead diver

In God’s eye.

Translated from the Spanish by Jorge Salavert, 2013.

The Romantic Dogs, by Roberto Bolaño

The Romantic Dogs

At the time I was twenty years old

And I was crazy.

I had lost a country

But gained a dream.

And if I had that dream

The rest did not matter.

Not working, not praying

Not studying into the morning

Beside the romantic dogs.

And my dream lived in the gap of my spirit.

A wooden room,

In darkness,

In one of the tropical lungs.

And sometimes I turned within myself

And visited the dream: a statue eternised

Into liquid thoughts,

A white worm twisting

In love.

A runaway love.

A dream within a dream.

And the nightmare would tell me: you will grow.

You will leave behind the images of pain and the maze

And you will forget.

But at the time growing would have been a crime.

Here I am, I said, with the romantic dogs

And here I intend to stay.

Translated into English by Jorge Salavert, 2013.

This is the poem I chose to read at the annual Dead Poets' Dinner held in Canberra. It was well received by those attending. Even if the younger Bolaño, the one who founded the Infrarrealists Group in Mexico City, would have very likely booed at every single poem that was read at the Dinner.

Rain, by Roberto Bolaño

Estarcido de Bolaño, Barri de Sant Antoni, Barcelona, Catalunya. (c) Farisori, 2013

Rain

It’s raining, and you say: ‘it’s as if the clouds

were crying.’ Then you cover your mouth and hurry

on. As if those scrawny clouds were crying?

No way, impossible. Yet where does that rage come from,

that desperation that will take us all to hell?

Nature shrouds some procedures of hers

in Mystery, her stepbrother. And so, this evening,

which you believe similar to an end-of-the-world evening,

sooner than you think will seem just

a gloomy evening, an evening of solitude lost

in your memory: the mirror of Nature. Or maybe

you will forget it. Neither the rain, nor the weeping, nor your steps

echoing on the cliff track matter now;

Now you may cry, and let your image dissolve

on the windscreens of those cars parked along

the Promenade. Yet you cannot get lost.

Translated into English by Jorge Salavert, 2013.

4 poemes de Juli Capilla

Transnational Literature, the Australian online literary journal, has published my English translations of four poems by Valencian poet Juli Capilla in its latest release, Volume 5, Issue 2. The four poems (‘La collita’, ‘La sang’, ‘L’infant etern’ and ‘Mort’) belong to his award-winning book Raspall.

At a time when the Catalan language is suffering a constant, virulent, vicious attack from both state and regional political institutions, it is for me a pleasure to divulge a small example of Catalan-language literature in Australia, even if it is in a very modest format. I'm also thrilled to be able to give a little publicity to the achievements of a young poet, who works very hard in his various roles as a high-school teacher, as an author (he has just published a little book for younger readers about the old train that used to join Gandia and Alcoi, Un tren de llegenda, el Txitxarra) and as a person who has been seriously committed to Catalan letters for such a long time.

The four translations are preceded by a very brief introduction. You can read it online or download the PDF from the Transnational Literature website.