On “Sueñu/Suañu”

In 2019, the two words at the center of this poem briefly became a sort of banner for the fight for language diversity in Spain’s northern region of Asturias and in the country more broadly. The teacher and language activist Víctor Suárez Piñero posted a tweet explaining the difference between sueñu and suañu: “You can have the suañu of becoming an astronaut, but you go to bed when you have sueñu.” In addition to the meanings Suárez Piñero alludes to, sueñu can denote “the act of sleeping” and suañu “the images one sees during sleep.” In Spanish, all these definitions are collapsed into one word, sueño. “Who could be bothered,” Suárez Piñero continues, “by us wanting to conserve our linguistic richness?” The tweet garnered support from fellow Asturians and speakers of some of Spain’s other minority languages: Basque, Catalan, Galician.

Among those voicing their solidarity was Pablo Texón, one of a growing number of authors who writes in Asturian. He shared a poem that metaphorizes this linguistic idiosyncrasy. The first time I read “Sueñu/Suañu,” I was struck by its outward-facing posture—the almost ambassadorial tone of its opening line—and how it seemed to invite translation. It reminded me of the many times Asturian friends had introduced me to a new word in their language, often ones that didn’t have an equivalent in Spanish, like the verb “trescombar,” which appears in this poem and whose definition reflects a central fact of Asturian life: the scaling of mountains. It means something like, “to cross over a peak, gaze out across the landscape, and keep going.” Though the English-speaking reader can’t intuit the loss of such a rich verb from the word I chose, “summit,” they can tease out the various possible meanings of sueñu and suañu. Through this process, the poem prompts them to consider the relationship between motivation and self-preservation, between the safety of home and the thrill of leaving, between dreaming and dreaming.