Albert Sanchez Pinol

Small languages have rights too.

That was the message of the special guest exhibition at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year in which the books displayed were predominantly in Catalan and showed how the language, spoken by an estimated 13 million Europeans, has been fighting a battle against extinction.

The 1.3-million-euro ($18 million) special exhibition of historic Catalan books and printing plays up the pathos of that battle, including bans on the Catalan language in 1714 and 1939. About 130 authors and 600 actors and other artists from the region are part of the event.

Xavier Pla, curator of the exhibition, said in an interview: "The language has survived a lot of oppression. We were not allowed to speak Catalan or write Catalan. It's a very sad history. Now we are enjoying the freedom to speak it."

"Europe has to learn," says Pla, himself a leading author, "that it is not only the big languages that have a voice."

"It's important for us to say this is not a dialect, but a language with a very long and rich tradition," he said.

Catalan is also spoken on the Balearic Islands, the Valencia region, Andorra, a part of France and one town on the Italian island of Sardinia.

No recognition

Critics of the Catalan government's Catalan Culture Book Fair project have suggested that it gives no recognition to those in the prosperous northeastern region who prefer to speak the Spanish language.

Book Fair chief executive Juergen Boos said, "I am sorry that we don't have the complete range of Catalan culture here."

Leading authors Eduardo Mendoza and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who live in Catalonia but write in Spanish, said they would stay away.

As a result, the exhibition, mounted on both sides of a circular wall built in the middle of a cavernous, 2,500-square-metre pavilion, is more suggestive of old grudges than of exciting new novelists and thinkers.

Pla

Catalan literature has an 800-year history, including the work of a 13th-century mystic philosopher, Ramon Llull of Mallorca, who is respected among Catalans much as William Shakespeare is among English speakers.

The two classic 20th-century writers in Catalan were Pla and Merce Rodoreda, both of whom fled abroad when the army of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco won control in the Spanish Civil War.

Pla (1897-1981), whose specialty was descriptive journalism, is the most widely read author in Catalan today, with his collected works filling more than 40 volumes.

He was a foreign correspondent for Spanish newspapers for many years. Bilingual like many Catalonians, he only began to write in Catalan in 1939 after Franco's victory.

Modernist

Rodoreda (1908-1983) was the first major modern novelist in Catalan. Her novel La Placa del Diamant (Diamond Square, but published in English as The Time of the Doves) describes a woman's life in the civil war.

Rodoreda herself was 20 when she was obliged to marry her much older uncle. She went into exile in France and Switzerland and did not return to Catalonia till the 1970s.

The sombre days of the dictatorship also provide a background for a more recent novel by Maria Barbal, 58.

Pedra de Tartera (Mountain Scree) was first published in 1985 in Catalan, but did not shoot into the German bestseller lists till this year after it was praised this spring on a television literature programme.

Barbal's account of the tough life of a girl growing up in the Pyrenees and the shock of being uprooted is autobiographically inspired: Barbal lived in the mountains till the age of 13 and is now a secondary-school teacher.

Her novel Carrer Bolivia (Bolivia Street), published in 1999, describes how immigrants from outside Spain have changed Catalonian urban life.

Like Barbal, many of the contemporary Catalan authors who will put in appearances at Frankfurt Book Fair now pay less heed to the Franco era and write about modern themes.

Monzo's ironic short stories about the pitfalls of daily life pick up on a Spanish and Catalan tradition of surrealism. Barcelona-born Monzo, 55, acquired his sardonic tone as a newspaper columnist.

"Monza is in the tradition of Franz Kafka, with lots of humour. He is very Catalan but also very universal," said Pla.

Catalonians who write in Spanish have felt excluded from the Frankfurt culture festival.

Tilbert Stegmann, a University of Frankfurt professor who is Germany's top teacher of Catalan literature, defends the bias, saying, "The Catalan language and literature have a lot of catching up to do, whereas Spanish is doing fine."

DPA

Subject: Germany, books, Frankfurt, fair, literature, Catalan