Catalan: Are we that bad?

Defeatism with the language gets us nowhere. Catalan is alive. Life is always unstable. It serves almost everything: literature, cinema, journalism, education, science, politics... Presenting both service and battle. Rapid foreign demographic growth has weakened its relative position, but in absolute terms there are more speakers than ever. Pessimism, therefore, is only relatively justified. Optimism as a method is more effective than the dramatic fatalism that is eating away at us, that paralyzes us. It's not about denying the complex reality or the glaring weaknesses (justice, business, the street), but about looking at it with different eyes. About shedding the heavy burden of victimizing, not to say catastrophic, negativity that, in effect, is leading us to catastrophe.

Let's allow young (or not so young) writers, journalists and filmmakers, teachers, scientists, and politicians to demonstrate the vitality of the language, to breathe new life into it, and connect with the general public naturally and without sacrificing quality. Let's allow them to surprise us, to generate empathy and support. Let's give Catalan a new chance, a renewed hope. It's possible. And above all, it's desirable. In fact, it's happening, but we refuse to see it. We only see the problems, which are there. Let's also focus on the dynamism.

In reality, it's always been this way. Catalan has been reinventing itself, striving to seduce. Like democracy, it needs to be constantly protected. From the hand of Narcís Garolera and his book Six writers (Leonard Muntaner), I will refer in particular to the cases of Jacint Verdaguer and Josep M. de Sagarra. In times of greater social and political turmoil than those of today, they were two cultured authors of explosive popularity, who made the language shine and gave it a fabulous civic dimension.

A very young Verdaguer, 20 years old, already obtained two distinctions in the Floral Games of 1865 for two poems with a patriotic theme. Thus began a brilliant career, which after a decade (1877) would give rise to Atlantis –praised by the later Nobel Prize winner Frederic Mistral and by Menéndez Pelayo–, which would be followed Idylls and mystical songs, the Montserrat native Virolai –when Pope Leo XIII in 1880 proclaimed the Moreneta patron saint of Catalonia–, the ode In Barcelona (1883) and Canigou (1885), which, as Garolera says, intended to "counteract the supposed Spanishness of his first great epic, Atlantis". In 1888, the year of the Universal Exhibition, the compilation arrived Homeland, with poems as well-known as The emigrant. In the 1990s, his problems began: the exorcist drift—which distanced him from the ecclesiastical hierarchy—, the excesses with almsgiving—which made him clash with his patron, the Marquis of Comillas—and eventually the choice of going to live with the widow Duran and her two daughters.

When Bishop Morgades finally deprived him of the right to say mass, Verdaguer responded to the press, and here began a new dimension of popular connection for his work. His polemical articles In self-defense He does so in Catalan, in Spanish-language headlines, and with a direct, first-person style of absolute modernity. He uses "a living, natural, cultured, and popular language at the same time, unusual until then in a Catalan media outlet," notes Garolera. This is the marvel of his passionate prose. And so, confronted by power, he connects even more with the popular masses. Prematurely aged, when he dies at 57, 300,000 people accompany the funeral in the Montjuïc cemetery, among them the young Pablo Picasso.

And Sagarra? Well, the same. Against the exile of the novel by the Noucentisme movement, Sagarra overcomes his fear of trying it. An already established poet and playwright, in his forties he writes Private life, "the novel of present-day Barcelona", where everyone appears, from the Carlists to the nudists, and which opens with a scene that is like a cinematic close-up (from 1920, when he lived in Berlin as a correspondent forThe Sun, had become interested in cinema). Modernity! And a great success: writing it in plain, "lively, almost colloquial" Catalan. Yes. Then as now, Catalan is still alive.