Llengua i literatura [Language and literature]- La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
- Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
- Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
- Barcelona, 2011
- 287 pages
The sixth volume of the Barcelona 1700 collection is dedicated to the always risky topic of language and literature, and includes articles by Joan Santañach i Suñol, Xavier Torres Sans, Xavier Cazeneuve i Descarrega, Albert Garcia Espuche, Francesc Feliu and Josep Solervicens. Like the rest of the series, this volume also underscores micro-history and social history to demonstrate the cultural growth of a city that, in the year 1516, had ten booksellers and 23 by 1714. Articles such as “La decadència de la Decadència. Consideracions sobre un concepte historiogràfic prescindible” [The decadence of decadence. Considerations regarding a dispensable historiographic concept], by Joan Santañach, establish that the romantic (and highly ideological, in the worse sense of the word) construction of the supposed “shameful decadence / in which the Catalan fable lies”, as Aribau said to Ramon Muns in 1817, has to be revised. Confusing diglossia, politically imposed by absolutism, with Castilianisation, is an error made too often until only recently, but nowadays it is a position that no longer holds up thanks to the available documentation.
The text by Xavier Torres Sans, titled “Llegir, escriure i escoltar a la Barcelona del Sis-cents” [Reading, writing and listening in seventeenth-century Barcelona] coincides with the observations of Albert Rossich and Pep Vallsalobre on appraising the effort made by men of letters at the end of the 16th century to construct a more demanding literature in Catalan, frustrated by the “heavy silence” after the Catalan Revolt. An unbiased review of the apocryphal Llibre de feits d’armes de Catalunya (which could be translated as the Book of Deeds of Arms of Catalonia) worked upon by Coll i Alentorn is still pending, and which, being a careless text written by a supposed rector from Blanes from the 15th century is, in actual fact, an “oblique form of political controversy”. It would also have been interesting to carry out an in-depth analysis of the highly complex figure of Narcís Feliu de la Penya and his Fènix de Catalunya [Phoenix of Catalonia; 1683] which, despite being famous as “literature of contrition”, is possibly much more than that. Feliu is a difficult character, and excessively marked by what are known as “retrospective readings” in literary history.
But it is true that the decline of Catalan did not begin after the defeat of 1714; its roots lie particularly in the political crisis after the Catalan Revolt. It is becoming increasingly more evident to historians that the loss of Catalan freedoms must be read as a two-act, rather than a one-act, tragedy. From the sociolinguistic standpoint it is obvious that a country’s loss of political power always goes hand in hand with the loss of the social prestige of its language. The self-hatred of the vanquished is a factor that is also well known to psychologists, so it should come as no surprise that a shaky language and the temptation to abandon one’s own language to take on the neighbours’ would constitute a very obvious characteristic among the dominant classes after two defeats, those of the Catalan Revolt and the War of the Spanish Succession, which left the country flailing and bereft of confident dominant classes. The same pidgin mixture of Catalan, Castilian and Latin used by the poets of the period, such as Jaume de Portell, studied by Francesc Feliu in the article “La llengua literària” [The literary language], can only elicit a smile of commiseration nowadays. It is worth retrieving, from the above article, a very brief excerpt by the canon Josep Romaguera, dated 1681, in which he attempts to “refute the vulgar mistake through which our language is scorned as coarse and crude”. Romaguera, who subsequently became a militant pro-Habsburg, also shows to what extent the most lucid people in the Catalonia of the time were aware of the existence of serious problems in the area of what we now call diglossia.
The defeat of 11 September was the definitive nadir for Catalan language. The notary public Aleix Claramunt, in the chronicle of the siege of Barcelona of 1713-1714, explicitly titled “Per desengany dels esdevenidors” [To the disappointment of those to come] wrote: “May his divine majesty look upon us in pity so that we may learn to mend our ways and fulfil our obligations as loyal vassals. As time goes by things settle down”. As everyone knows, things “did not settle down” at all, but Catalan language was still alive and kicking in the street even in the harshest times of political persecution; a persecution that was brutal and has been documented beyond dispute by Ferrer i Gironès.
Perhaps this is why the most innovative part of the volume are the articles “Paraules de la ciutat del Born” [Words of the city of El Born], by Garcia Espuche, which documents the rich vocabulary of the time, and the extraordinary “La llengua de la documentació notarial de la Barcelona del 1700” [The language of notarial documentation of Barcelona in 1700], by Xavier Cazeneuve, which shows that Castilian barely existed in documents before 1714 and had a purely token presence afterwards, simply because people did not speak the language of Castille. It took a full-blown and minutely-orchestrated programme of brutal repression by the absolutist Bourbons to attempt to turn the tide and make Catalan a minority language.