Avoid Madrid

Can you travel the world as a Catalan? Yes, but it requires patience. Constant explanations must be given. The interlocutor usually starts with a prejudice: you're Spanish, period. This is where the mess begins. It gets tiresome.

In cultural terms, during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, Catalonia began to emancipate itself from Madrid: artists (also writers, scientists, etc.) began to travel directly to Paris and other European capitals, without going through Madrid. These were the years of Modernisme, Noucentisme, and the avant-garde movements; politically, of the Mancomunitat (Mancomunidad) and, once Primo de Rivera's dictatorship was over, of the Republican Generalitat (Generalitat). The Institute of Catalan Studies and the Catalan PEN Club are the fruit of this impulse.

Franco's regime ended up dynamiting that collective effort for cultural independence. de facto. We had to start over. For some time now, Catalan literature has been going it alone again in the world, without the crutch of prior translation into Spanish, which always helps. Catalan culture as a guest at the 2007 Frankfurt International Fair marked a turning point. The Ramon Llull Institute has done a good job. Official recognition of Catalan in the EU would be a logical consequence of this trajectory and would help us continue moving forward.

Carles Torner, who was a key figure for Llull and Frankfurt, has written the autobiographical essay How to be an ambassador of a country without ambassadors (Portico). Catalonia has the Llull Institute and political and commercial delegations, all without the rank of state. Some treat us with suspicion; others view us with sympathy; others treat us with suspicion. The global ultranationalist shift doesn't help: there is an attitude of closure toward diversity, freedom, and tolerance of difference.

Torner's mentor and role model was the poet Jordi Sarsanedas, who loved the title of an essay written by his friend Paul Scott, president of Scottish PEN: In bed with an elephant, about the coexistence of the Scots with the English language. Like Catalan with Spanish? "Living with an elephant in your bed has something of an extreme quality to it, because with its spontaneous movements, even without any malicious intent, it turns over in bed and can crush you." Elephants are the largest land animals in existence, with thick skin and a good memory: you'd better get in their way, especially if you're a mouse... because, according to popular wisdom, mice frighten them.

Avoid Madrid is the title of the shortest chapter in the book. "It points to a void: what I haven't done." Torner has spent little effort seeking Spanish complicity, although it has sometimes proved decisive. For example, when the complicity between presidents Pasqual Maragall and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero made it possible for Spain to avoid obstacles to Catalan culture being the guest of honor in Frankfurt, with Llull as the sole responsible. But of course, without the prior German-Catalan connection, a connection with historical roots would not have been possible. Things don't just happen: in 1502, the Heidelberg printer Jan Rosembach printed the first German-Catalan vocabulary in Perpignan for use by Germanic merchants. And even earlier, in 1415, the polyglot troubadour Oswald von Wolkenstein, in a song, proclaimed and proudly displayed his ability to speak Catalan. Germany is, on the other hand, the country with the largest number of university readers of Catalan and the place where the work of Ramon Llull has been most studied.

Torner's international work for decades, both in the MIEC (student movement) and in the PEN and at Llull, has led him to establish acquaintances and friendships with personalities such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o or how Anna Politkovskaya, whose determination and courage she has never forgotten: "Putin is a murderer. Putin is a butcher. Putin is a pathological racist," Politkovskaya said on one of her trips to Barcelona. On October 7, 2007, the tyrant's birthday, she was murdered in her Moscow home.

Informal cultural diplomacy, forged with empathy and hard work—in recent years also in support of Ukrainian writers—has allowed Carles Torner to weave a global network of complicity to continue Catalonia's desire to remain in the world.