2023-06-14 10:17:45
Agustín Gajate is a journalist and writer from Tenerife who will raise this challenge tomorrow at a conference on the Guanche language at the Island Library of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in an act that is part of the Encounters with the Author project.
“The Guanche language from Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa to the present day” is the title of the conference that will be given by Gajate, who explains in an interview with EFE that he will propose to the attendees to travel back in time and carry out a linguistic immersion with the forms of expression used by the Guanches “that have survived to this day, compiled by different authors and at different times in each and every one of the islands.”
The central figure of the dissertation is Cairasco de Figueroa as the first nationally renowned Canarian writer in the Golden Age of Spanish literature, and who in 1582 premiered the comedy of receptionin which two of his characters, Doramas and Sabiduría, have a short conversation in the Guanche language, a language that the author spoke and knew through his mother’s blood.
Thus, Bartolomé Cairasco puts into the mouth of Doramas: “Guanda demedre tamaranone tasugiet besmia”, which means “invites to celebrate with a modest banquet”.
Since then, no references or works have been found in which Canarian authors have used the Guanche language as a form of expression beyond the collection of oral testimonies or the dissemination of studies on place names and anthroponyms, adds Agustín Gajate.
It was precisely this journalist and writer from Tenerife who took up words in this language in his 2013 bilingual collection of poems Achicaxna xaxo agual, pariah mummy wordand three years later in the novel The foundations of Gomorrahwhose dialogues are written in Guanche and translated at the bottom of the page.
The first poem of achicaxna pray thus: “Ynfaca xaxo, ynfaca, I will tell you here. Ayahirahabi. Ayadahentiren. Ayacaman» (Wake up mummy, wake up / you are in our land under the dark universe / under the white stars / under the Moon).
This was possible after Gajate began to investigate the survival of the language of the ancient Canaries and found that there are thousands of words registered, not only names of places and people, but even the numbering from 1 to 999.
Authors such as Antonio Viana also collected words from the ancient Canaries and Leonardo Torriani even collected two lamentations, one from Gran Canaria and the other from El Hierro, and recently the philologist Maximiano Trapero published a three-volume dictionary of place names.
One of the dirges proclaims “Mimetahana zinu zinuha ahemen syen haran hua zu agarfu fenere nuza”, that is, “What does it matter to me that they bring me milk, honey and wheat if love does not want to look at me!”
“It is a tool to use,” says Agustín Gajate, also author of the “antipoemario” nothing, nobody, none, who points out that the Guanche language has been basically oral and therefore there is no Rosetta stone on the islands that gives the key to its translation; there was no approach to engrave its history in stone, but, if anything, to inscribe signs and indications, as occurs in the engravings of El Julan (El Hierro).
For this reason, Gajate disagrees with the proliferation of editions that compare the language that the peoples amazigh They are used today in North Africa as if it were the same as the language spoken by the Guanches before and after the Castilian conquest.
«Despite the fact that both languages probably have a common origin, the time elapsed, with at least fifteen centuries of separation, and the historical ups and downs in Mediterranean North Africa mean that the resemblance between the two languages is, at best, similar to that of Italian and Portuguese, both coming from Latin, but clearly differentiated languages today”, he explains.
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