The Marathon Bombing and the Life of the Mind, As Seen by a Catalan Speaker
By Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB (with essay below by Montse Alarcón Flix)

Here’s a story that ends up with a new take on the Tsarnaev trial. My paternal grandparents immigrated to the US from Ireland; they met in Boston and married in 1898. Their firstborn, John (my Dad), went to high school in Boston at “Commerce High.”

The mayor of Boston required every commerce student to learn about Latin America, as that was assumed to be a place for exporting and importing. One day, around 1916, Dad happened to find, on the street, a page from a comic book in Spanish. He was fascinated.

His teacher, John Donnelly, was Harvard ’06. Donnelly said to his student “You should go to Harvard. Talk it up with your father.” My grandfather was a fireman in Boston. He had been a horse breaker in Ireland and was suited to the new job, as the fire engines in those days were pulled by a team of six horses. Thus Granddaddy was a “teamster.”

Dad took the scholarship exam. He was told to “bring your own ink” to the exam. He did. He passed. When the letter of acceptance arrived in the house, I’m told that Grandma rubbed it on her apron and handed it to her son. She must have recognized the Harvard insignia, as she was totally illiterate (a scrubwoman at a now-demolished hotel near Scollay Square).

Dad graduated in 1922, with a major in philology (the scientific discipline of linguistics, his later love, did not yet exist). “John” must have lacked ambition, as he went to work in the big ham-canning company (perhaps Morell’s?) and stood all day at a bench, canning ham.

Maybe he was deep in thought. His teacher, Charles Hall Grandgent, was the major scholar of Dante in those days. Dad was big on “The Divine Comedy.” In the 1930s he became a Boston Public School teacher, teaching science in the South End.

The Catalan Language

Dad was interested in all things Spanish and loved Portuguese. (His big shortwave radio on the dining room table was pretty esthetically unpleasing to Mom!) In the 1960s he tried to master Catalan. Pretty hard to master a language you have never heard spoken, but he thought maybe he had got it right, by using a guide to the phonetic pronunciation.

In the 1970s, when I lived in Manhattan, Dad asked me to visit some music stores there to see if I could get any songs in the Catalan language. I strolled down 14th Street, where there were plenty of Hispanic music stores. (Ah, in those days, no MP3 nonsense; you had to buy the plastic ‘record.’).

Sadly, none of the dealers seemed to know of Catalan. Dad died in 1981, having never conversed with anyone in that language.

I am pleased to say that I bequeathed Dad’s interest in linguistics to my step-grandchild. This started when she and I took a train to France from Germany (where I was studying law in 2001, as an exchange with Adelaide). Being far from home, she asked me what she should do if I died on the train. I said Go find an adult who looks sensible and point to me and say “Elle est morte.”

Having practiced that a few times she really dug into French and later enrolled for some immersion French in Canada. She now has a diploma in Linguistics from the University of Paris, and lives in Berlin. She doesn’t know that it all started when her step-great-grandfather found a comic book on the street a hundred years ago.

What Has This To Do with Jahar Tsarnaev?

I write for Gumshoe News in Australia. This came about because the founder of Gumshoe, Dee McLachlan, is the only person in the world who got in touch with me about my 2011 book, “Prosecution for Treason.” We now write madly about the woes of the world -- with the unfair imprisonment of Martin Bryant in Australia, and of Jahar Tsarnaev in the US, being a specialty of the house!

Now comes a writer named Montse Alarcón Flix, who saw me mention (at Rumor Mill News) that it would be good to write in Spanish about Jahar, as there are so many Hispanics in Massachusetts.

Then she saw my Youtube video about Aunt Maret Tsarnaeva (who, let me tell you is a stitch), and offered to send me a translation of it, for publication, in Spanish.

But wait! Montse also offered to translate it into Catalan (and gave me a slight rap on the knuckles for not knowing how widespread is the use of Catalan -- not just in what my sister calls “Barthelona” but elsewhere in Europe).

Well, I’m not Daddy’s girl for nothing (now in my 70th year). I jumped at the chance to put my work – sorry, Aunt Maret’s word, aided by Jack Remington Graham – into, of all languages, Catalan (and Spanish, too). As a vehicle for announcing these translations at GumshoeNews.com, I created a video about the “now worldwide support for Jahar.”

Wait, there’s more! I needed a narrator. Dee McLachlan did the narration for the English-language video, and Stuart McKay added the music. Then I found someone to do the Spanish narration, Andy Cancun. Great.

The Sagarra Connection

But what about Catalan? I advertised for a narrator and got one whose surname is the same as the person who translated Dante’s Divina Comedia into Catalan, Sagarra. (Wikipedia says of Josep Maria de Sagarra, “Nacimiento in Barcelona 1894, fallecimento 1961.”)

So I decided to email Montse to mention that my father was a student of Charles Grandgent. Did I ever get a knockout e-mail in reply!

And now, Daddy dear, I’d like to tell you that, thanks to your interest in Catalan, and my regret that I couldn’t get you any songs from 14th Street, you’ve caused me to converse with this lady in Catalonia. And she has provided a STUNNING view of the “Boston Marathon problem” – which she takes to be an issue of universal proportions.

I was thrilled to receive it, and have printed it below, with her permission. She conveyed it to me merely as conversation in an e-mail. Montse conquered English only three years ago, remarkable in itself. But earlier in life she conquered … um … life!

I think many will ‘relate to’ her expostulation here. It puts into words what I have been feeling for some time, especially regarding the practice of law. That is, I feel that the whole world is collapsing, due to the burden of deceit.

The Boston Marathon and the End of Fiction
by Montse Alarcón Flix

I'm a writer of fictional stories in Catalan. I have 11 completed books, mostly unsold. I am – or was -- a compulsive reader, mainly of fiction.

When I was 14, I had the card number 100 of the public library in my town, a city of more than 50,000 people. (Even the number 100 was high, as they didn't accept my first request submitted before the age of 14). Eventually I became a registered user of many public libraries in Europe.

When I learned that aspects of the Marathon bombing are pure fiction, my first thought was that the professional writers of fictional stories in the English language should sue the US government for interfering in their profession!

I have read most of the Greek classics, such as Aristophanes, and Latin ones of Petronius, Ovid, etc. I have read most of the representative books of the entire field of literature. I can read Spanish as well as Catalan, some ancient Latin and Greek, Italian, a little of French, and now also English -- thanks to Jahar Tsarnaev.

I have read all of Dostoyevsky. I felt outraged when I ended the many hundreds of pages of “The Brothers Karamazov” and then, asking at the library for the continuation, was told that Dostoyevsky died, leaving the book unfinished. How could any writer die while writing such a great work!

Dying shouldn't be allowed to inspired artists! Weren't the geniuses immortal? I thought it was irresponsible to leave the reader in the middle of such intricate theological doubts and arguments as he did!

Of course I’ve read Dante several times, in three languages, the richest translation being the one in Catalan. I’ve read all of Kafka’s oeuvre. His “Metamorphosis” is, in my opinion a book infinitely less decisive than “The Trial,” which inspired an article in defense of Jahar.

I confess that I’ve even indulged in pieces by Ralph Hornsby and Corin Tellado! I mean I'm the kind who will read anything printed in a book or similar.

But since the Boston hoax, I suddenly stopped reading fictional stories -- and writing them. Despite my media exposure being low compared to others (as I haven't seen TV for many years), I got to the point where I felt saturated with bad and bizarre fiction.

Media’s lack of contact with reality, and particularly the toxicity of the Marathon case, maimed my once notable capacity for digesting reality through written fiction.

Why would anyone read Kafka when we find every day kafkian arguments in our newsfeed? Why would anyone read Orwell when we are living in an already orwellian world? Why read Dante when we have on the news a Dante scene of people without legs, with all the falsification of a case against Jahar?

Why would anyone be interested in any story by a really talented writer of fiction, when our entire reality has been subverted to become a bad fiction?

Our intelligence has been mistreated to the point where we are unable to distinguish fiction from news (or if you're still able to distinguish it, you're not allowed to point out the difference).

Then you have no other option than to stop buying "real fiction" because you are being force-fed "fictional reality."

That's the reason why I thought that writers of fiction in English should sue the US government for professional interference by their promotion of the lies of the Boston Marathon.

It is thanks to Jahar that I’ve had to learn English. I look forward to talking with him one day when he gets free of prison.

-- end of 'essay' by Montse

Mary Maxwell adds: Below is the Spanish version of the minute-and-a half video, and at bottom of the page is a link to a Gumshoe article that leads to both the Spanish and Catalan texts of the affidavit sent by Jahar’s Aunt Maret to the US District Court in Boston just after Jahar’s trial.

-- Montse Alarcón Flix, the owner of Library Card #100, can be contacted at Mary’s website: maryWmaxwell.com.