On the death of Xuan Bello

Xuan Bello, a great writer in the Asturian language, a great writer of our time in any language, has died at the age of sixty. He died, as they say, unexpectedly, and that is consistent with him, because he never wrote, thought, or said anything predictable. This is evident in his books, in which surprise, the unexpected, lurked, as in Borges's maxim: "I have said dazzlement where others say custom." However, he was not seeking gratuitous dazzlement, an easy coup de grâce: the dazzlement in Xuan Bello's pages responded to the wonder of the very fact of living. A tragic wonder, the painful marvel of living. The glare, at the head of the street, to put it like another great poet, Jordi Sarsanedas.

Xuan Bello has been a leading author of emergence of Asturian literature, a responsibility that he sometimes assumed as an honor, sometimes as a burden, always with heartbreaking literary wisdom and a corrosive and contagious sense of humor. Universal history of Paniceiros, a collection of stories that form a kind of novel about a specific world that becomes mythical, is emblematic and one of the most important books in Hispanic literature (Bello believed in the idea of Hispanic literature as a meeting place for the languages and cultures of the Iberian Peninsula; he was an Iberianist). You can read this book in Catalan in a translation by Jordi Raventós, who, as an editor for the Adesiara label, has also published two other books by Bello, equally recommended: Snow and other circumstantial accessories, and Several pretty things. Another other, Uncertain history of truth, was published in Catalan by the Rata label, translated by Jordi Llavina.

Asturian is a language spoken by some four hundred thousand people, and Xuan Bello demonstrated in Spain, and around the world, the full dignity of a small, minority, and undervalued language, to the point of not having, when he began to write, any kind of legal status (even today, much remains to be done in this regard). Many did not even consider it a language: they called it, and still call it, bable, a babble, a blah blah. Xuan Bello paved the way, and today Asturian literature is a small but brilliant and valuable reality, with excellent and diverse authors. He did it without ever crying, without lecturing anyone, without the fuss of a savior, with an ironic, pragmatic, and astute view of life. Searching the internet, I came across a TV3 program, Reader's Hour, in which Emili Manzano, based on a comment made by Carlota Subirós about a book by Hélène Cixous, asked Xuan Bello and me about the idea of language as a refuge. "Refuge, yes, but porous," replied Xuan Bello. "I like passport identities, which is why I'm very happy with my Asturian identity, which allows me to acquire others. A person's life is a collection of identities." Xuan's collection has come to a close here, and the whole is a party to which we're all invited.