Plain speaking

Cat­alo­nia is di­vided into 42 can­tons, called 'co­mar­ques', their bound­aries orig­i­nally de­ter­mined by how far me­dieval farm­ers were pre­pared to travel to the local cap­i­tal on mar­ket day; over the years, each co­marca has de­vel­oped its own cus­toms, fes­ti­vals, eat­ing habits, di­alect, and so forth. All this is men­tioned by way of a pre­am­ble for one par­tic­u­lar 'co­marca': the Pla de de l'Es­tany, not far from Girona. Its name means 'Plain of the Lake', due to the huge aquifer-sup­plied loch - there used to be a mon­ster there be­fore it was turned into a tame her­bi­vore by a French priest in the eighth cen­tury - that sits smack in the mid­dle of the plain. Its wa­ters look like shat­tered glass under the sun and at twi­light, like jig­gled silk. The rest of the co­marca is made up of low hills try­ing hard to qual­ify as moun­tains; plenty of farm­land; and vil­lages most of which were built seven hun­dred odd years ago, as was the cen­tre of the can­ton's cap­i­tal, Bany­oles. I'm fairly fa­mil­iar with the area, as I am with its cui­sine, which con­sists prin­ci­pally of meat. But it wasn't until I stum­bled across a novel by a Bany­oline writer, Miquel Aguirre, that I got a real taste of the par­tic­u­lar di­alect of the Pla de l'Es­tany (also used, by the way, by its im­por­tant Gam­bio-Cata­lan com­mu­nity). The novel - 'Els morts no parlen' ('Dead Peo­ple Don't Talk') - is an ex­cep­tion­ally sat­is­fy­ing piece of writ­ing in­volv­ing a case of at­tempted black­mail by a local lowlife and his loser ac­com­plices that reads like a cross be­tween 'Pulp Fic­tion' and 'Fargo', only fun­nier. As for the di­alect in which it is writ­ten, pigs are 'ver­ros' as op­posed to stan­dard Cata­lan's 'porcs'. And 'es­perxar' is a verb unique to the can­ton which means 'to get caught in the branches of a tree'. And an ob­ject is never 'on' some­thing but rather that 'on the peak of' some­thing. So 'the pig's on the table' would be 'el verro està al cim de la taula'. But what is re­ally as­tound­ing is the rich­ness of the swear­ing. The char­ac­ters in the book greet each other cheer­ily with the ep­i­thet 'fotut burro' ('screwed-up don­key'). And the verb 'car­dar' (to shag) is - at least in the Pla de l'Es­tany - an all-pur­pose word that stands in for 'to do', 'to be', 'to eat', 'to drink' etc. and even, on fairly rare oc­ca­sions, to for­ni­cate. So 'no me la car­daràs pas, fotut burro' would be, lit­er­ally, 'you're not going to shag me over, you screwed-up don­key'. As has been pointed out, each and every one of the 42 can­tons in Cat­alo­nia, has its own di­alect (and in the case of the Oc­c­i­tan-speak­ing Val d'Aran, its own lan­guage to boot). That's three and half dozen com­mu­ni­ties turn­ing the air dif­fer­ent shades of blue. You might have thought the tourist guides would give that a pass­ing men­tion. But no.