… And from the old house I will make the new house: Conceyu Bable and Literature

Abstract

On July 20, 1974, in issue 267 of the magazine Asturias Semanal, with the Franco dictatorship gasping its last breaths and in a context of social, political, cultural, and economic crisis especially severe in Asturias, the journalist Melchor Fernández Díaz interviewed “a group of university professors” under the headline “Let’s speak in Bable”. This group of professors consisted of Lluis Xabel Álvarez Fernández, Xosé Lluís García Arias y Xuan Xosé Sánchez Vicente, who acted “as spokespersons for a more or less broad, unorganized, non-bureaucratized group that has set itself the goal of doing something, as important as possible, for the Asturian language”. The interview ended with the question “What means are you going to use?” to which a very simple answer was given: “Fundamentally, write, write and write”. This interview is the prelude to the modern process of linguistic, literary, and cultural vindication that would later be called Surdimientu. That same year, 1974, in issue 285 of the aforementioned magazine, the first written section of “Conceyu Bable” appeared, signed “by the CB group”, which would be legalized as a cultural association in 1976, defining itself as a unitary cultural association that worked for the defense of the Asturian language and an Asturianist movement. The contents that follow are an approximation, necessarily summarized, of what CB meant for the development of modern Asturian literature, a literature that, in those 70s of the last century, was, like the Asturian language and culture in all its aspects, in a very precarious, not to say pitiful, situation, with texts based on a diglossic treatment of the language and on worn-out genre themes that had been repeated throughout the 40 years of Franco’s dictatorship, generating literary models that, with some honorable exceptions, can only be described as outdated. We will speak, mainly, of the authors and the literature that began to be made in those years and that was the one that opened the way to the rich literary panorama that we can enjoy today.