The Catalan Sleeping Beauty and the Anfós

This is the story of a sleepy girl and a bouncy fish. Many years ago, in a place called Catalonia, some grumpy gentlemen with mustaches and beards the color of shoe polish, or nuclear detergent, believed that Catalan wasn't dead but rather a Sleeping Beauty. They set up franchised stores throughout the country and christened them "La Renaixença" (The Catalan Renaissance). What did they want to sell? Salt spray! No, just kidding. They believed that Catalan would awaken after its narcolepsy of 1714, possessing a literary language, a language of culture. And how would they achieve this? With sex.

To make the girl overflow, they went to find the carnal sustenance in the mountains. There, Catalan was alive as a fresh sardine, or a wild carrot. Fishermen and peasants possessed the fertilization of the language while the elites of the capital buried themselves with Spanish. They thought Catalan was ruining their siesta, hiding among forests and phosphorescent streams. They rushed to give each other mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was a kiss of assisted breathing. And they made out: with a fish. Its name was Anfós. Also known as anfuoso, king, the gerna, the grouper, grouper… It was promiscuous by nature. Sensual, attractive, fleshy, tasty. Sexy. Mossy and inward-facing. It could be a fish, a rabbit, a flea, a magpie… The literature of the Renaixença is full of beasts like Anfós and fishermen who converse with it. They are the living language. Catalan reproduces itself again with a shot of serránido (a type of Catalan sausage) in its veins and a sprig of thyme to inhale. The words, the stories, the places, the people… To know is to remember, Anfós confessed, before performing its last service to the homeland with a baked meal of onions and potatoes. Bon appétit.

Now Belle is at the table, but not the Beast. We have literature. Thousands of writers, publishers, genres, translations. A thousand of everything. And we have no fish. Now Anfós has become Sleeping Beauty. We saved literature and now we have no people. If before language was in the mountains, in the rivers, in the trees, now it is locked away in offices, in bunkers, in sects. Much masturbation and little shared sex. There is no fertilization. If the lower made the upper, what will we do now that there is no lower? The celestial vault, ideal, cannot stand without the earthly, real column. Remember the bricklayers.

"A language does not die because those who do not know it do not learn it, but because those who know it do not speak it," wrote Joan Sales. And this ties in, like aioli, with what Josep Maria de Sagarra summed up: "We have always lost our way by being too understanding and too tolerant." What would one of those serious gentlemen of the Renaixença say today? What would Joaquim Rubió i Ors, who wrote one of the manifestos of the resurrection in The Piper of the Llobregat (1841)? Let us quote the gravedigger: "Catalonia can still aspire to the glory of having its own literature and not borrowing from anyone... Limousin is still alive in our mountains, it is still spoken on our coasts, and the air of our inns is still full of its echoes and harmonies... I am not yet, and it can be as sweet as Italy's, as splendid as Castile's, and as energetic as England's."

Head and tail make the fish. But if Anfós's chief is dead and Bella's tail is alive, what will we do?

Resurrection today either comes through the fish or it won't come through Bella. And if one dies, the other dies. Perhaps at sea it doesn't come from a fish, but in Catalonia, it does. Many boats to fish, few fish to eat.