Laudator Temporis Acti

Robert Hughes, Barcelona (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), pp. 28-29:

The earliest names for the two rivers that bordered the medieval city of Barcelona were the Merdança (shit stream) and the Cagallel (turd bearer), whose waters were totally unfit to drink by the fourteenth century and have remained so ever since. The first item in the invaluable collection of Versos Bruts (Coarse Poems, edited by Empar Pérez-Cors) was written in the early thirteenth century and takes the form of a discussion between two nobles, Arnaut Catalan and Ramon Berenguer V, count of Provence and Cerdanya, concerning a hundred noble ladies who went to sea in a boat and, becalmed, got back to shore by farting in chorus into its sails. One of the durable favorites of Catalan verse was Vicent Garcia (c. 1580-1623), rector of Vallfogona, a village in the Pyrenean foothills, who wrote sonnets in imitation of Luis de Góngora and Francisco Gómez de Quevedo, but whose real popularity depended on his burlesques, banned by the Inquisition. They included such works as To a Monumental Latrine, Constructed by the Author in the Garden of his Rectory and On a Delicate Matter, which roundly asserts that no person, however low, not even a Portuguese, could have anything bad to say about shit. Excrement, Garcia wrote in a Dalí-like transport of enthusiasm, is beneficial, the sign of our true nature, a kind of philosophers' stone that "the pharmacists of Sarrià / contemplate night and day." In doing so he evoked the peasant origins of the cult: shit as the great fertilizer, the farmer's friend, the emblem of root and place.

Labels: noctes scatologicae