Galician: 100 words for rain

Last week we celebrated the day of the Galician Letters: while the local councils planned public readings, spoken word performances and fun activities, we visited the Archive of The Kingdom of Galicia in a Coruña, where centuries-old manuscripts are kept, painstakingly restored, and made available for the public. Humidity and termites, we learn in the laboratory, are the worst enemy for these documents. But so are ignorance and fund cuts that threaten this precious collection.

Eolian, the language in which Sappho wrote the first erotic verses of Western literature, was already on its last leg by the time Athens had become the main power and imposed Attic as the common language among the Greeks. Nobody thought of reviving Eolian; instead, people who spoke it were considered uneducated barbarian as Plato tells in the “Protagoras”.

Galician, like Sicilian in Italy and Occitane in France had a similar course: once the languages of a culture that flourished around the most sophisticated medieval courts of Europe, were finally hounded down by the modern states for the sake of homogeneity.

Like neglected gardens, whose exuberant designs and patterns can still be guessed under the tall weeds, the wealth of Galician language can be found in the lilting accents you hear in the villages and in the words that pepper their speech: words like bretema, that wet mist (breath) that comes from the sea and obliterates the landscape in the first hours of the morning, treboada, the trembling and booming storms that so often tear the skies here, and orballo, the graceful and naughty drizzle, almost invisible at first, but that gets you completely soaked in 5 minutes.

Despite being Galician, General Franco didn't harbour any sentimental attachment to this language and the efforts to eradicate it from the native soil during his dictatorship were only matched by those to plant hydrangeas -his favourite flower- in all the gardens near his summer residence, a castle across the bay of a Coruna, in Galicia.

The court of justice has ruled that the castle is to re-enter public estate but the Franco’s family is currently fighting to keep the art collection inside, which is the result of decades of looting local museums and churches around Spain. Among the works Franco kept there are the sculptures of Mestre Mateo, the author of the Portal of the Glory in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela and the vast library of novelist ad women's right activist Emilia Pardo Bazan.

It has been over 40 years since Franco’s death, but one can still see the hydrangeas blooming in spring from the terraces of the villas facing the Atlantic. Languages may die, but literature won’t: we are still reading Sappho’s delicately balanced stanzas. In one of her poem’s translation, that is more an act of creation because the sixth century parchment is so heavily damaged to make the writing mostly illegible, Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo managed to convey that haunting feeling arising from the memory of lovers we have abandoned or languages we have forgotten:

This voice not unknown

Rings in syllables

Sliding over the sea