A Week "to counteract linguistic colonialism"

BarcelonaStanding at a stall during Catalan Book Week, I discover, to our mutual delight, my secondary school language and literature teachers. They're chatting with the writer Oriol Molas, another former student. "We come every year. We're here at ten in the morning, we're the first ones," they confess with amusement, even though they're coming all the way from Torelló (Osona). "We've already selected the stalls and publishers we want to see." They're loaded with books. How lucky I was, I think, to see them as passionate about literature as they were when they taught us. They've just retired after more than forty years of teaching at the Sant Miquel dels Sants School in Vic. They're a wealth of experience. Tell me the truth, are we really that bad?

"Reading at home has plummeted," confirms Carme Codina. They had maintained the same high reading standards (they quote Kafka, Don Quixote, Othello, The Violin of Auschwitz, the Greeks) but they had stopped giving exams because students "are capable of doing them perfectly well having read summaries on the internet," says Codina. "AI and the digital world have done a lot of damage to reading, because they are two different rhythms. The brain adapts to digital acceleration and, on the other hand, to read you need calm. You have to make them read in the classroom and give them a break. When there is silence in class, that is golden. Read well," explains Silvia Caballeria. "I could spend a term with theOdysseyBut better yet, a little and good. That way you end up with a small readership." After forty years, we are indeed a lot of readers.

Minority language, but in Guadalajara

"We are, to a large extent, what we have read. And of course, the more we read in Catalan, the more natural we will find it," stated a wise man like the philosopher Pere Lluís Font. Latest Honorary Award for Catalan Literature, at 91 years old, has defended the Week as a necessary space to "counteract linguistic colonialism" at a time of "clear decline in the social use of Catalan."

"The human universal is only found in the singular of each language. Ibsen and his people are so Norwegian, with such force, that is why they are so European and so human," he reflected. "The limited dimensions of our language are not an obstacle, because there are no small languages, but they have limited the dance. Kierkegaard." Lluís has defended the need for paperback books, the need to continue translating the classics into Catalan (as he has translated Descartes, Pascal, Montaigne, Spinoza, Kant, etc.) and for the university to regularly publish in Catalan.

"Reading in Catalan is an act of freedom, and writing in Catalan is an act of generosity and resistance," stated Ilya Pérdigo, president of the Catalan publishers, who defended Catalan as "the language of the country and a universal language of creation," with Barcelona's participation in the Guadalajara International Book Fair in mind. Pérdigo called for Catalan to be "the vehicular language of education" to guarantee the vitality of our culture and asked the Generalitat (Catalan Government) to provide budgets and, finally, for Culture to reach 2% in order to allocate resources to "developing the readership." "We must create new speakers as a prelude to creating new readers," noted the Minister of Language Policy, Francesc Xavier Vila. He stated that there are 100,000 people enrolled in Catalan courses, 50,000 new Catalan speakers each year, and 25,000 new Catalan speakers are added each year.

What do they talk about in the bar?

All the cultural debates will converge over the next eight days on Passeig Lluís Companys, where 256 Catalan-language stamps are grouped into 94 small booths for the Week. The Catalan publishing sector is selling optimism (In 2024 they announced the best year in sales in history) but luck varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. The elephant in the room is Catalan and the difficulty of overcoming it—perhaps the good news is that it remains— the third of readers who regularly read in Catalan. The decline in reading comprehension among children And the abandonment of Catalan among young people who are switching to fantasy novels in Spanish is another hot topic. "The publishing that's doing well is the Spanish-language publishing," says Eumo's editor, Montse Ayatsþ. "In Catalan, the market remains the same. We must maintain production, but we must focus on creating and seeking new readers. It's essential that books return to schools. Given the lack of comprehension and digital dispersion, we have some...

Business concentration is the other. trending topic from the bar of the week. "I think that the operation of Periscope sale in Group 62 "It's an anecdote, not a symptom," says Eugenia Broggi of L'Otra, who rejects euphoric and catastrophic speeches. One consequence of this phenomenon is that independent publishers are struggling to reach readers, given the overwhelming output, especially from large publishers. They're missing. "They see you, they buy you," says Ayats. Joan Carles Girbés, former editor of Sembra and editor of Ara Llibres, recalls that "independent publishers were born when new independent bookstores were also emerging and becoming overwhelmed; now we're at a different stage," he reflects. "It's also harder to create a community on X, which at one point served to reach readers without filters and has been lost as a constructive space; it's a bastion of acrimony."

La Semana is the complete opposite. "We're a fairly well-matched sector, and Semana acts as a unifying force. Even if there's tension because one author is a fan of another, it's so small that we either understand each other or we don't understand each other," says Broggi. Semana, indeed, is a happy bubble because everyone is doing well and everyone speaks and reads Catalan. Vicenç Villatoro, Emma Vilarasau, Montse Barderi, and Eduard Escoffet, the Catalan Literature Institute's commissioner, Marta Salicrú, speak at the same time. Jordi Nopca, the language commissioner, writes, "and therefore, everything depends on your style of choosing a title or your knack for selling it," celebrates Miquel Adam of La Segunda Periferia. And it even matches the titles that are a success and the books that the market has rejected, which can have a second chance." The temporary relocation between the Diada and the Mercè and the location on a busy thoroughfare like Lluís Companys Avenue is confirmed as a success. Have a good week, everyone.