2 posts tagged “catalan”
It can be easy to forget, when reading the Inferno, just how tall an order it was to create a hell that exceeded the extremes of contemporary military and political violence on earth. The lovely Middle Ages of modern nostalgists aside (no names, but you people know who you are), it was hideous. I am reading a brief history of the Catalans— alongside desultory reading about Spanish history in general and 14th-century Florence and so forth— and, seriously, yuck. I'd never have the stomach to work on this period; I don't care how magnificent the troubadours were. Under the banner of a peculiar seafaring German, a nasty band of Catalan mercenaries, the Almogàvers, sailed to Constantinople in 1303 and briefly overpowered it; on the way back they captured Athens and much of the rest of Greece. Did you know about this, Catalan hegemony in Greece and Asia Minor? No? My source is Jan Read's The Catalans (Faber & Faber, 1978). It was a bloody, gory, gruesome messy mess, and no one misses the Catalans in Greece today. From there we move on to a chapter on the great era of Catalan preeminence in the Mediterranean, presided over by a king who made his enemies drink molten metal. This is all too obvious to be worth mentioning, but it isn't as though Dante was wandering around Bella Tuscany eating goat cheese and dreaming up nightmare scenarios with which to smite his enemies; he needed only to take notes and extrapolate.
It is far from clear what lessons one can derive from this. The idea of Necessity lurking in the past really does seem dangerous. Also, Jesús Moncada = good, although I don't know what's been translated etc. Also, expect me to be an utter sniveling wreck by the end of two weeks or so, when my papers come due. At least I am learning to conceive of worlds distant in time and space... even if "when the papers are due" is a misty one...
What passes for "seminar paper planning and research" around here is occasionally risible, but I had the best of intentions when I began, and only hours later did I end up fishing around for details about Harold Bloom's 2002 Catalonia International Prize. I note with great chagrin that the prize of 80,000 euros was then valued at $75,000— I mean, chagrin on Bloom's behalf, of course, for not getting it 5 years later.
[Also, I am craving, craving blueberry pie. But that is of no importance.]
Ahem. Another article (pdf) mentions that Bloom includes half a dozen Catalan authors in his reading list appendix to The Western Canon. Who knew there was an appendix? Who knows why we have a copy of The Western Canon in the house? To the bookshelf I go. The appendix amounts to 39 pages or so, comprising a "Western canon" that only really completely excludes East Asia, for incomprehensible reasons— the Hindu sacred texts are there; Mahmud Darwish, Ngugi, Chinua Achebe, Narayan and Naipaul and Rushdie and CLR James, the Qu'ran, the Thousand and One Nights, a ton of Latin American and Caribbean literature, but not a jot from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Tibet, or their diasporas... baffling. I guess it is all Too Far East. (I was actually going to say here that reading the list was a disorienting experience, in perfect innocence, but the pun is stronger than I am.)
But in any case: quibbling about what should or shouldn't be on the list— Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? and not Grossman's Life and Fate?!: voilá, Harold Bloom has killed culture— misses an important point, which is that anyone who actually tried to read all these books would go insane. This is not a canon with an individual reader in mind; it's more like a vote for the books that should be in the library at all. I know it's a cliché, but unread books aren't good for much, and these days I'm happy to hear that anyone not actually in a literature program wants to read even three of the Western Classix. If they can read ten— great! Greeeat! Literacy! And how long is this cliché going to hold? It certainly shows no sign of dying out. There are ways to make the library a more appealing place, and to draw more people into it, but if I have to choose between reading and library planning, I'll choose reading— although it is beginning to seem less elitist or imperialist or choose-your-adjective and more simply, eccentrically, quietistic. I would like to know how many people have been inspired by Azar Nafisi to read Lolita. I can't imagine there are many.
The six Catalan authors, incidentally, are Carles Ribá, J.V. Foix, Pere Gimferrer (all Selected Poems), Joan Perucho (Natural History), Merce Rodoreda (The Time of the Doves), and Salvador Espriu (La Pell de Brau: Poems). No Tirant lo Blanc or Ramón Llull, I'm afraid. Of these, I can only vouch for Espriu in Spanish translation: it is godhead; it made me tear up in class. And, um, yes, um, it made me want to learn Catalan, a little bit. I'm not sure what made me want the pie, which I am still visualizing, however: eidetic pie? Pie-dos? Alas, there are no blueberries in this cave.
