Avui comencem el cap de setmana amb dos articles de Matthew Tree (Mateu Arbre?), escriptor nascut a Londres, català d'adopció des de començaments dels vuitanta. Han aparegut publicats a Catalonia Today. Els textos del senyor Tree estan sotmesos a la llicència de Creative Commons, per la qual cosa crec que no estic cometent cap crim contra la llei per reproduir-los.
No els he traduït per manca de temps. Mentrestant, au va, aparqueu la vostra mandra i practiqueu el vostre anglès. Sé que això és molt lleig per les persones que no el saben. Sempre que publico posts en altres llengües (ho he fet en italià, occità, àrab, castellà, francès, etc.) he mirat d'incloure la traducció catalana per als lectors - jo mateix moltes vegades, eh - que no els entenen. Si avui hi ha algú tan amable de prendre's la molèstia de fer aquesta feina, a través dels comentaris, jo no li ho prohibiré. I potser li enviaré un regalet a casa. No és broma, eh.
EYELESS IN FRAGA de Matthew Tree
(aparegut al Catalonia Today del 12 d'abril del 2010)
Fraga is the capital of the Franja de Ponent: a strip of territory running along Aragon's border with Catalonia, in which Catalan is spoken by a higher percentage of the local population (a total of some 50,000 people) than anywhere inside Catalonia itself. Among these Aragonese Catalan-speakers is Joaquín, a Fraga-born friend of mine, who – when I visited his home town in March - told me about a new problem at work: he has a fixed stand at the ecological fruit and vegetable market held in Saragossa, the capital of Aragon, every second Saturday. As he buys his apples from Lleida, they arrive in boxes marked 'Fruita de Lleida'. For months, customers had been berating him noisily for daring to serve this blatantly Catalan produce, until the fair's organisers asked him to do something about it. So he put his apples in boxes marked 'Plátanos de Canarias' and since then has had no complaints. This taken-for-granted loathing of everything Catalan is, he says, getting worse, in Saragossa and elsewhere. As some friends of the journalist Patrícia Gabancho found out last year when they went to the El Prado gallery in Madrid: while commenting on a painting (in Catalan), a passing Spanish art-lover loudly informed them they were 'Catalan bastards'. The radio presenter Sílvia Tarragona got a similar reception in Madrid from the pickets at Radiotelevisón Española when she turned up for work during their 24 hour strike on March 3rd: 'you shitty Catalan!', screamed the workers. This quasi-racial hatred blowing ever more strongly in from monolingual Spain, could well be the real reason why so many Catalans are quickly and quietly organising their multiple referendums for independence. Before I left Fraga, Joaquín told me about a Catalan girl who recently started going out with an Aragonese friend of his. When she visited her boyfriend's village, an elderly man came up, stuck a finger representing a gun barrel to her head and said 'Catalan: bang, bang!'. Let's hope Catalans will be able to enjoy the protection afforded by an independent state before such violent sentiments are expressed in - how shall we put it? – more physical terms.
LEGISLATING THE OBVIOUS de Matthew Tree
(Aparegut al Catalonia Today del 02 de juny del 2010)
The headlines in the Barcelona press announcing – on May 6th last – that the Valencian government had finally accepted that Valencian and Catalan are one and the same language, didn't go round the world or even past the Pyrenees; yet they marked an end to what surely must have been one of the most superfluous linguistic controversies on the planet. Background: in 1232, Jaume I, the Count-King of Barcelona and Aragon, began to conquer the territory due west of Lleida (owned by the Caliph of Baghdad). By 1238, Jaume had taken Valencia City and went on to seize Alacant. He populated this newly acquired region, known in English as Valencia - which, in its final form, stretched from just beyond the Catalan border town of Ulldecona all the way south to Elx - with mainly Catalan settlers (a minority came from Aragon, which is why a snippet of the Valencian area is traditionally Spanish-speaking). Over the following centuries, Valencia became a key part of the Catalano-Aragonese empire, in which Catalan was the universal language of administration, law and commerce. In the 18th century the cultural ties between Valencia and Catalonia were loosened following their forced incorporation into Castile's new hegemonic version of Spain (the one we still live in today). In the 20th century, to weaken the demographic importance of Catalan, the dictator Franco decreed that it was a completely separate language from Valencian (despite there being less difference between the two than between, say, Liverpudlian and Mancunian). Since then, the post-fascist right-wing in Valencia, headed by the governing Partido Popular, has toed Franco's linguistic line. As a result, for decades teachers from Catalonia and Majorca with degrees in Catalan have had to take a separate degree in 'Valencian' if they wanted to teach south of Ulldecona. This, at a time when Catalan writers were selling like hot cakes in Valencia and vice-versa, and when Catalan TV's soap operas - beamed over the border - were followed by tens of thousands of Valencian viewers with no linguistic difficulties whatsoever. So: after spending court fees amounting to 16.500€ per taxpayer in countless attempts to demonstrate that Valencian is not Catalan, the Valencian government has finally ratified the self-evident fact that it is. So now we know: the world is not flat; the Holocaust happened; fairies don't live at the bottom of anybody's garden, and 'bon dia' means the same up in Figueres as it does in down in Xàtiva. Phew!
