When Consum Preferred, the Anagrama Award by Andrea Genovart, went on sale a few weeks ago, various voices were surprised and complained about the narrator's Catalan, a broken Catalan with phrases made in Spanish from the first page. A controversy that escalated and ended with the author withdrawing from social networks, in which she had received personal attacks. At the moment, voices for and against arose, many of which, as often happens in the networks, had not even read the novel. It is a recurring debate, and not even two years ago it had already surfaced when Guillem Sala published El càstig (L'Altra), with many of the dialogues written in Spanish, and when the playwright Carol López had Bonus Track on stage, where the characters They spoke in both languages. Then Juana Dolores also began to do plays in which she mixed them.
In the current controversy there is also a work directed by López, Les amistats perilloses, in which the characters of Valmont and Merteuil, played by Gonzalo Cunill and Mónica López, speak Spanish in private, and another novel published in L'Altra, 1969 , by Eduard Márquez, includes a high percentage of pages in Spanish, now for documentary reasons. And the issue has spread even more and has reached television due to the use of Catalan and Spanish in series such as Cites Barcelona, on Amazon Prime, which has been filmed in Catalan and Spanish (although TV3 will broadcast it entirely in Catalan) or Smiley, the Netlix series –based on Guillem Clua's play–, which was filmed in Spanish, but in which some characters speak in Catalan, although a dubbed version entirely in Catalan was also made.
And we could still add what happens in music, in that beyond artists who write songs in one language or another, there is a more recent batch in which many songs are written in more than one, like Stay Homas, than in the same theme They can include phrases in Catalan, Spanish, English and Portuguese, but so does the euphoric Scorpio or the much-celebrated The Tyets, which often incorporate Castilianisms. But in the case of music, more than controversy, there is celebration.
For F. Xavier Vila, Secretary of Language Policy and Professor of Sociolinguistics at the UB, it must be taken into account that “on the one hand, in the world of creation, the author has to be totally free; on the other hand, literary traditions tend to be monolingual and cases of mixing are exceptions, on several levels”, and he mentions cases such as some fragments of Incerta glòria by Joan Sales, but also the Renaissance and Baroque periods, when mixing languages It was fashion and a symbol of distinction, and at the same time there are controversial cases such as Puerto Rican Spanglish. However, often behind many of these cases there are processes of gradual linguistic substitution, "until there comes a time when the mixture seems to be indiscriminate". “It is logical –he adds– that when it affects a minority language, these phenomena should be seen with caution, because to be viable a language must have its own and exclusive functions, and when you put the other language in this context, you are undermining the one that is deficient” , but distinguishes if the mixture is free or if "the author seeks authenticity, to reflect a reality", which can also be done critically.
Thus, Vila separates the literary cases, in which you can try to reflect the society you are talking about (in the case of Sala, in the dialogues, in the case of Márquez, the Barcelona of 1969, and in the case of Genovart, the world and the generation in which the narrator develops) of musicals "because traditionally urban music has tended to mix languages, each genre has its conventions". On the other hand, he sees more problematic than in a play like that of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, "a monolingual piece that has nothing to do with linguistic diversity: here it is seen that, as the Spanish Constitution says, there is a language of compulsory knowledge and the others are optional. The director defends her choice based on the actor, who does not feel comfortable with Catalan, but curiously, an English actor who began to learn Catalan just a year ago also participates in his work, Tom Sturgess, who beyond a wink in his native language speaks in catalan in the work. "Literature is a world of fiction and you can do whatever you want, it's legitimate, but the artist would have to consider it responsibly, because one of the results of minorityization is the lack of expressive resources," says Vila.
Genovart explains that he decided on the interior monologue style before writing the novel, he was very clear about it: “In the interior monologue, I wanted to make Spanish appear from the popular saying and for the proverb to coexist, organically, with the reading of a label of a carton of milk, writing an email, reading a fragment of Perec, a WhatsApp conversation, listening to a song in English or a poorly spoken Spanish by the French partner of the protagonist”. A language to “reflect the reality of today's modern city: chaotic, interrupted, contradictory, with register interferences and, of course, idiomatic. It would not have fit me to build a first-person, neurotic, overstimulated and constantly traversed by everything that Barcelona offers today from a flat, coherent style and with a unique register and language model”. For Genovart, "it is risky and dangerous when personal judgments are made around fictional proposals, because a series of competences, capacities and motivation for choices are assumed on which I have not ruled, and that supposes a displacement to the detriment of the work, which is eclipsed or reduced to certain aspects that do not represent its totality”. On the other hand, she points out that “unfortunately, a writer, no matter how careful he or she is, cannot save Catalan; In any case, and more likely, a greater number of initiatives for linguistic normalization will do so, a more ambitious school curriculum with the language or getting those of us who go to the polls and vote for parties with more Catalans to be Catalan. electoral programs committed to Catalan", and demands the author's freedom to "commit his work to a political cause as far as he wants". In addition, he defends that "in the current state of our language, the decision to write in Catalan is already an act to be recognized and celebrated".
The editor Eugènia Broggi recalls that cases like El càstig or 1969 are very different, because the first is fiction and the other is a documentary narrative, although both try to portray a reality. For her, Sala's novel "is not a cause, it is a consequence, a mirror of reality, a way of representing a world, in this case the outskirts of Barcelona", while Márquez's book "is built and thought to reproduce in the most direct and faithful way the climate of that year in Barcelona, through documentation and testimonies that were there on the ground, so the use of Spanish is difficult to avoid because it was the prevailing, legal and imposed language, and all documents were in that language, the author's intention is to reproduce the climate of repression, oppression and social, political and also linguistic claustrophobia”.
The linguistic popularizer, writer and screenwriter Enric Gomà, however, does not believe that art necessarily has to reflect reality, and even less the language: “One does not write to describe any idiolect – the uses of a language proper to a speaker – , that is a matter of lexicographers, but it is that although we think that Genovart's novel defines a generational speech, it is not like that, it is very difficult to reflect it”. “Part of the problem –says Gomà– is that we have convinced ourselves that literature is style and style is language, but language is often looked at from a philological point of view, and it is not that, because that look is perhaps interesting only four philologists. For me, character defines literature better than style”. It also happens that in Catalan many readers have "the spirit of proofreading, thinking what is normative and what is not, but that goes against the work", specifying, yes, that proofreaders are really clear about the differences between the norm and the pertinent and literary uses. "We know that our language is in danger and we feel the weight of having to save it, but that is not the job of a writer, who has to be free," he adds, without meaning to deny that "we have a problem with Spanish, that threatens us and has too pre-eminent a role”.
The philologist and translator Pau Vidal sees in works like this "a symptom of the battle, and that some of those involved do not see it that way is another symptom that confirms it: we are at war and you cannot pretend that you are not taking sides with any position . Each hybrid product is a bullet that shoots the hegemonic language”. For him, "reflecting reality is a desideratum, literature cannot reflect it, they are cheap excuses", in addition to the fact that "in some cases it is seen that a hybrid product is justified to hide the lack of capacity of its author".
Vidal believes that it is clear that "we are heading towards a hodgepodge and in the next installment of this debate, ten years from now, Catalan will be even more invisible, and part of the responsibility will lie with those who now make hybrid products", among to which he does not hesitate to add urban music: "Popular music is even more interfered with, and it is often praised when music is made in Catalan, but it is the resignation of the loser", without forgetting that "it is true that there is a part of generational code , because these poor kids have had the double misfortune of growing up in a probilingual environment and on top of that in the reggaeton era”.
Catalan version, here
