Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[Eric]

There's a meeting in the Independent with Carlos Ruiz Zafón:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...y-7878485.html

Zafón writes in Spanish, not Catalan, although he profiles himself as an author from Barcelona. He has lived in the USA for almost twenty years.

[Liam]

He has lived in the USA for almost twenty years.

The asshole ought to write in English, then, the official language of our country, or else f*ck off, .

[Eric]

I like Catalan. I have a very thick book somewhere in my library about how Franco systematically tried to get rid of Catalan by banning it. That was how the Russians also did it with many of the languages spoken by conquered peoples. The Brits were more brazen and that is why the Indian subcontinent has English as its lingua franca. But they left the natives to speak their mother-tongues among themselves. There are many ways of maintaining an empire. Language and national and personal identity is a subject worth studying.

Maybe old Zafón could write in an even more international language - such as Esperanto.

[Stiffelio]

It doesn't really matter what language he writes in. It's trash all the same.

[Liam]

Watch it, Stiffy. You're getting dangerously close to sounding like Eric.

[Daniel del Real]

Today I started to read Juan Goytisolo memoir Coto Vedado. In the first pages he explains why he, being a catalán, writes in Spanish. His father side had origins in the Basque country so he wasn't fond of Catalan; this beside what you say about Franco banning all languages but Spanish, helped to create this outsider personality of Goytisolo. "I'm Catalan for the Spanish and Spanish for the Catalanes"

[Eric]

I rather suspected that Zafón wasn't that great, whatever language he writes in, by the fact that he has managed to get so prominently into a British daily that rarely promotes interviews with non-English authors. But I haven't read a word by him, so cannot tell by my own experience whether Stiffelio is right.

Daniel never seems keen, somehow, on the Catalonian-speakers. I think they've done very well to re-emerge and get back to their mediaeval level of literature, after being persecuted (this is not too strong a word) by Franco. Unlike the Basques, only 7% of whom speak Basque anyway, so I've read, the Catalonians have no reputation for blowing people up to restore their culture. And there appear, judging by the Ramón Llull website, to be a great many people who write in Catalan. Yet Catalan seems to be a red rag to a bull for Daniel, who somehow implies at times that Catalan is all a fraud. But there are nations that continue to write in their idiom when under pressure from bigger, somewhat bullying, nations. That is what interests me about the Balts and Finns who have stubbornly continued to write in their own languages, not Russian. (Remember that Finland was part of the Russian Empire from the early 19th century until 1917, and endured periods of Russification.) This can be contrasted with the Irish, almost of whose major writers nowadays seem to have put their eggs in the English-language basket.

[Daniel del Real]

Ok, hold on you language-defender yuppie. I never said that Catalans defend their language and culture the same way than the Basque does. Neither in any moment I attacked the survival and use of their languages and usages, so where do you get that from?. I only said, that Goytisolo´s family from the father side, had Basque origins, thus they never felt identified with Catalán culture and language, resulting in Juan and his brothers never been able to soak up in the Catalan experience. So Eric, cut that shit out and learn to textually read and stop misinterpreting everybody's words. Getting tired of all your stubborn and negligent interpretations so you can fight what you think is the right thing and your already known speech.