Xuan Bello, a writer between 'señaldá' and 'joie de vivre'

Xuan Bello (1965-2025) had celebrated entering his sixties less than twenty days earlier, on July 10. On Tuesday the 29th, a cruel aneurysm took him from us. A poet, above all, he was internationally recognized as a narrator: Historia universal de Paniceiros (2002) was his greatest success. He used Asturian for his literary creations and Spanish for much of his journalistic work. He is the most recognized figure of the second generation of Surdimientu, the movement to recover the Asturian language and culture, which began in the mid-1970s. Read also Xuan Bello: “The truth is built with many lies” Magí Camps Barcelona A precocious poet, he published his first book, Nel cuartu mariellu , in 1982, when he was not even seventeen. He collected all his lyrical work up to 1999 in La vida perdida . Xuan was one of the most wonderful conversationalists I've ever met. The color of his skin made him look like a farmer. Given his vast cultural background (he'd read almost everything), you'd think he was a pale-skinned scholar who lived forever locked in a library. He had a gift for words and knew very well that literature is, above all, oral tradition. He transformed his small town of Paniceiros and its surrounding area (the municipality of Tinéu) into a literary entity comparable to García Márquez's Macondo, Rulfo's Comala, or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. As he recounts in one of his best-known poems, "Bello comes from old age (not from beauty), but he transformed everything he touched into beautiful literature (I say that myself)." He used Asturian for his literary work, and Castilian for much of his journalism. He preferred wine to cider. He was rather frugal in his eating, and lamented the fact that people no longer sang after meals. His overwhelming personality reconciled signodá —the Asturian form of Portuguese saudade—and joie de vivre . I always thought of him as a worthy representative of Leopoldo Panero's verse: "The soul dreams of its own distance." He believed in the brotherhood of all Iberian peoples and in a way of doing politics that embraced the underprivileged. For almost six years, at the beginning of the millennium, I presented a book program for the now-defunct Catalunya Cultura. I interviewed hundreds of authors from around the world. I struck up friendships with very few. With Xuan, yes. The coherence between the book he came to present, Los cuarteles de la memoria (The Quarters of Memory) (2003), and his affable and dedicated demeanor was complete. I was fascinated by the writer, but, just as much as he was by the man, who from that day on became my Asturian friend. He possessed the enthusiasm of children and retained something of their innocence. In the dedication he wrote to me, he referred to the book as a “ball of yarn in which the labyrinth of the world becomes entangled.” Xuan made me fall in love with his language (Asturianu, not bable, which was originally a pejorative term), with his land, with his family. He introduced me to other great Asturian authors: Pablo Antón Marín Estrada, Berta Piñán, Antón García, Martín López-Vega, Ana Vanessa Gutiérrez. And to the beloved doctor Federico Muñiz. He always dedicated his books to me as "Asturias' ambassador to Catalonia." It has been translated into Spanish by Debate and Xordica. Adesiara and Rata have translated it into Catalan. Read also Without Xuan, this world would become poorer and more absurd. Fortunately, he, so far-sighted, took pains to make it much better with his works, which will endure. (A big hug, dear Sonia and Lena!).