In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, Trini Milmany, a woman in her twenties who has been raised as an atheist in an anarchist family in the Raval, Barcelona’s quintessential working-class neighborhood, decides to get baptized. The ceremony is clandestine—not without risk in the revolutionary Barcelona of 1937—and Trini isn’t quite sure why she’s doing it. What she does know for certain, though, is that it will shock her mother, with whom she has never gotten along. And that’s exactly what happens. “So you’ve joined the bigots, have you? Does it make you happy to be with the blue-bloods?” her mother snaps when her daughter tells her about her conversion. Trini, cruelly, has the perfect retort: “Well, Mother,” she says, “I’m not a traditionalist like you and your son.” She hits a nerve. “Traditionalists?” her mother shouts, exasperated. “The Carlists …, they are the traditionalists, the holy water birds, the sacristy rats who chew hosts by the handful!”
This scene illustrates the reading experience of anyone who dares to tackle Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory), the monumental novel from which it’s drawn, and of which Joan Sales (1912–1983) published a first version in Catalan in 1956, at the height of the Franco regime, eight years after returning from exile in Mexico. Trini’s mother’s reaction to what she sees as her daughter’s incongruous behavior (how could an anarchist even think of becoming a Catholic?) ultimately forces her to confront her own prejudices. Similarly, the four young Catalans who star in Sales’s novel—Trini Milmany; her romantic partner, the bourgeois anarchist Lluís; his friend Cruells, a seminarian; and Juli Soleràs, a nihilist—constantly defy our expectations and disrupt our interpretive frameworks. After 500 overwhelming pages, in which the four struggle to survive the war on the Aragonese front and in the Catalan rearguard, as a reader it’s hard not to end up just as disoriented as Trini’s mother.
The fact that the novel was published in 1956 did not mean that Sales stopped working on it. The French translation by Gallimard in the early 1960s (undertaken at the suggestion of Juan Goytisolo) was already based on a more extensive version. And the first Spanish translation—done by Carlos Pujol, in collaboration with Sales, in 1971—worked from a manuscript that had grown so much that the final section, set in Francoist Spain during the 1960s, would eventually be published separately in Catalan as El vent de la nit (The Wind of the Night).
A decade ago, Peter Bush translated both novels into English. Earlier this year, the Catalan novelist Gonzalo Torné published a new Spanish translation of the first volume. In June, I spoke with both translators about a book that is as powerful—bold, multivocal, elliptical, irreverent, and immoderate—as it is difficult to classify.
Sebastiaan Faber: When did you first read Incerta glòria?
Gonzalo Torné: I discovered it about ten years ago. I had written a novel partially set during the war, but I had felt very alone in my efforts to avoid what I saw as the two main mistakes that appear in most Spanish novels about the war. The first has to do with literary technique: the characters act as if they already knew how the war will end. The second one is political and moral: in the bulk of Spanish literature on the subject, there tends to be a kind of pervasive civil violence—what in Spanish is called cainismo—as if there were no responsibility on the part of those who provoked the uprising and no one can be held accountable for the consequences of the war. If there are more complex political situations, for which accountability can indeed be demanded, those tend to get resolved in a sort of sentimental farce. (“Yes, well, my grandfather was an active agent of repression, but he was so nice to us at home, and he took such good care of the dog.”) When I read Sales, I found that these problems, which I had tried to resolve in my own way, were resolved in a truly exemplary manner. Incerta glòria is a novel in which the war sweeps over the characters, who are unaware of what is to come. And everything is resolved—or not—on the personal and political level.
Peter Bush: I, too, was blown away when I read the novel for the first time. I’d been living in Barcelona for nearly a decade and had already translated authors like Quim Monzó and Mercè Rodoreda from Catalan, but I was known above all as Juan Goytisolo’s translator. During his exile in Paris in the 1960s, Juan had spearheaded the French translation, and to me he’d always spoken very highly of Sales.
SF: What do you remember of your first reading?
PB: It took me back to my own youth. In the 1960s, when I was active in a left-wing party in Oxford, one of my fellow students was an economist who later founded a small party in Barcelona. At the height of the Franco regime, he’d invite me to give talks on Marxism at a safe house on Balmes Street. The atmosphere in which Trini, Lluís, and Juli Soleràs move, which is full of radical ideas and intense debates, reminded me of those experiences of mine in the ‘60s. But if I ultimately decided to translate the book, it was also to make an intervention in the English-language literary world, where the literary representation of the Spanish Civil War is usually limited to Orwell and Hemingway.
SF: Sometimes I think of translators as a kind of literary smugglers. They bring a text from one linguistic space into another, and in doing so, they change that space. Gonzalo, what impact do you think this new Spanish translation will have on the Spanish literary scene?
GT: I don’t know. What I can say is that Sales’s text plays in several leagues at once. It’s not just active in the leagues of Catalan literature or Spanish Civil War literature. It also plays in the Champions League. It’s no coincidence that Sales’ influences include Gracián, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and the Brontë sisters. That’s why the first reaction that his novel elicits is usually one of shock: readers are surprised they didn’t know about its existence. Within the Spanish context, this is symptomatic: among the Spanish reading public, there still is a tremendous lack of familiarity with Catalan, Basque, and Galician literatures.
SF: How might this book change the Spanish literary landscape?
GT: It shows that the Spanish Civil War was won, culturally, in one way—but it was lost in many different ways. What’s disruptive about Sales isn’t so much that he was a Catholic author with certain conservative leanings, which are certainly present in the book. That, to me, is the least of it. What’s most striking is that he portrays, literarily, a way of losing the war that differs from the way the losers on the Spanish side are usually portrayed. While the Spanish loss was horrible enough, Catalans like Sales suffered a double defeat. On top of being defeated ideologically, politically, and economically, they suffer an added cultural and linguistic defeat as they see the public use of their language severed. In this sense, it’s fair to say that the long night of Francoism was more sinister and profound in Catalonia than in Spain. It’s an aspect of defeat that Spanish readers don’t usually consider.
SF: Peter, how was the reception of the English translation?
PB: Very, very good. The Guardian published an excellent review, and The Economist even ranked it among the ten best novels of the year.
SF: Has it changed the literary landscape as well?
PB: I’d say so. Among other things, it has changed how the English-speaking public views the Spanish Civil War—by showing them, for example, that there were Catholics fighting on the Republican side. But it also reminds English-language readers that in the 1960s, when the Beatles emerged in England, Spain was still living under a dictatorship and many Spaniards remained in exile. In short, it helps them understand that, because of the war and the dictatorship, several generations of Spaniards lost their youth.
SF: In Catalonia itself, I imagine that reading a canonical novel like this is influenced by all sorts of criteria that aren’t exactly literary. Readers in English and Spanish might approach it with less baggage.
GT: It’s obvious that a text is read differently within its own cultural and historical context—and even more so in the case of a novel written in a language that was officially banned and intended for readers that Sales wasn’t sure existed. The Catalan context, moreover, is quite conflictive. A left-wing critic like Joan Fuster considered the novel insignificant because the writer was Catholic; then there’s the debate over whether Sales did more or less than others to promote the revival of Catalan. But, in the end, all these considerations are external to the book. Once you start reading it, they recede into the background. If literature serves any purpose, it’s to make you look differently at something you’ve always seen in the same way. That’s what Sales achieves. He debunks myths—the idea, for example, that all Catalan nationalists were Republicans and all Spaniards fascists. He also offers a brilliant portrayal of anarchism as a source of opposition to communism. Although, personally, he found anarchism quite repugnant, he acknowledges its compassionate side—its humanity and generosity. And then, of course, there is the Catholic theme, as Peter already pointed out. By constantly rethinking his own perspective, Sales broadens that of the reader. He dismantles any knee-jerk associations and, by doing so, presents new problems and conflicts. Therein, for me, lies his value in the Spanish context, where historiography and literature have tried to resolve so many issues in a way that’s ultimately false.
SF: I always tell my students that, of all the different ways to engage with a literary text, translation is the most intense.
PB: No translation is simple, ever. In this case, one of my biggest challenges was the voices of the four main characters. They’re very distinctive, both when they serve as narrators and in their many dialogues. It took me a great deal of time and effort to get that right. Then there’s the issue of linguistic registers, which ties directly into the debates about the nature and status of literary Catalan. As we know, there are language purists who oppose any trace of Spanish in the Catalan language. Sales certainly wasn’t part of that camp. He wanted his Catalan to sound like it was spoken. The same, by the way, goes for the dialect of the Aragonese peasants who appear in the story. Looking for an English equivalent, I settled on the dialect my father spoke—he was from Lincolnshire—because for most English-speaking readers it’s a dialect they can’t quite place. More generally, in the dialogues I also felt it was very important to preserve the novel’s humor, of which there’s a lot. For me, this novel is a tragicomedy. Paul Preston, the historian, doesn’t agree with me on that. We’ve argued about it. (Laughs.)
GT: Yes, there’s a lot of humor! It’s a novel that will have you in stitches! Sure, it has a sinister kind of humor that makes your blood run cold. But in many other places, its humor is almost Rabelaisian.
SF: Gonzalo, what were your main challenges?
GT: The hardest part, as Peter said, was maintaining the distinct personalities of the various voices. But there’s a specific problem for any translator into Spanish who lives in Barcelona. As we’ve mentioned, in Catalonia there’s a school of writers who feel responsible for the preservation of the language and who won’t allow anything that even vaguely sounds like Spanish. Sales, too, was quite aware of the fact that he was writing to save a language. But he opted for a much broader range. For one thing, he expanded the language so that it could accommodate all kinds of registers and dialects and all kinds of topics, from the most colloquial to the most elevated: the dialogue, for example, transitions seamlessly from metaphysics to poop. And we see the same stylistic breadth in the nuances of the characters’ temperaments.
SF: Compared it to the 1971 translation into Spanish, yours struck me as much less “Castilianized.”
GT: You have to understand that Castilian Spanish and Catalan have different problems, both stemming from the dictatorship. Spanish still suffers from a sort of Francoist infection, a consequence of the regime’s appropriation of the language. It’s an infection, I’d say, that many Spanish writers aren’t even aware of. Catalan, on the other hand, suffered from its lack of connection to reality, due to the fact that, for 40 years, it had to limit itself to private experiments that could never become public. While translating Sales’s Catalan, I kept those two ideas very much in mind. What was very clear to me was that I could not fall back on the Spanish of the Franco era, no matter how “clean” it might be. In other words, the rural scenes could not sound like Miguel Delibes, and the group scenes could not sound like Camilo José Cela. My translation could in no way end up in the mental and verbal space that developed in Spanish literature during the Franco era. What I did allow myself to do, on the other hand, was what I always do when I write in Spanish: let my Spanish be influenced by the syntactic structures of Catalan. For one thing, that’s what all of us have been doing who are part of this strange “third way” that is writing in Spanish from Catalonia. For another, it fits perfectly with the impurity of Sales’s text, in which the Catalan incorporates a great deal of Spanish.
PB: I always try to preserve the impurities of the original in my translations. There, however, I face a different problem: English is not a pure language.
SF: What do you mean?
PB: I mean that I don’t think there’s a single English or American writer who, when sitting down to write, wonders whether what they’re writing is correct English. Yet it’s a question that a Catalan author will almost always be thinking of.
GT: Mind you, that obsession with correctness also exists in Spanish—and if it doesn’t, the Royal Academy of Language is happy to encourage it. One of its members, Ricardo Senabre, would write literary reviews that were little more than lists of the supposed errors the author had committed—especially us Catalan speakers who choose to write in Spanish. I don’t mean to say that Pujol’s 1971 translation of Incerta glòria reflects that extreme of a stance. But it did operate within a concept of correctness that sought to translate Sales’ Catalan into “correct” Spanish. I greatly admire Pujol as a critic and translator, but my strategy has been different: I’ve tended to let Catalan peek through, whether syntactically or through the almost literal translation of set phrases. I hoped to create a sense of dissonance in the reader, making them think, “You don’t say it like that, but I get it.”
SF: It has been said that Incerta glòria is the best novel ever written about the Spanish Civil War. But I’m not so sure it’s a war novel at all. Much more than the war itself, what matters in the novel is its effect on the characters and their relationships.
PB: Of course. One of the novel’s strengths is, precisely, that it conveys how, when a war breaks out, people cling to life, no matter what happens.
GT: I completely agree. In fact, one way to spot bad historical novels is that their characters are aware they’re living through a historic moment. They all play their roles as if they were in school, trying to get a good grade. There are many novels that are sympathetic with the Republican side that are unbearable as novels because all the characters are far too conscious of their roles. In that sense, you’re right: Incerta glòria isn’t a novel about the war. It’s a novel that explores what happens when a civil war sweeps over a group of characters.
SF: Could that proliferation of bad novels about the war be due to the fact that fiction has taken on—or has had foisted upon it—the task of healing the open wounds of the past?
GT: To answer that question, I think it’s best to distinguish between private and public readings of a novel. In private, it’s inevitable that you’ll relate what a novel tells you to your own life and literary experience. What’s interesting, in short, is not the ideological and psychological motives of the person who wrote it, but what the novel does to you, as a reader. From this perspective, my suggestion to anyone would be to simply start reading the book and let it do its work. You’ll have plenty of time afterward to make sense of your feelings.
SF: And what about the public reading you mentioned?
GT: It’s true that, in Spain, there is a certain reward for writers who stage a sentimental drama that gestures toward a false resolution of the historical and cultural problems we’ve been collectively dragging along, and which, moreover, are intensifying with the resurgence of the far right. Incerta glòria does nothing of the kind. In other words, it has nothing to do with novels like Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina or Fernando Aramburu’s Patria. It doesn’t offer a false sense of closure. If anything, it heightens problems and opens up wounds. It’s not one of those novels that present self-righteous, sentimental resolutions to political tensions. What it offers instead is complexity.
PB: We mustn’t forget that Sales took forever to write it. And each new version was more complex than the previous one.
Translated from Spanish by Sebastiaan Faber. The Spanish version of this interview appeared in CTXT: Contexto y Acción on July 17, 2026.
Sebastiaan Faber (b. 1969) is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College. He is the author, most recently, of Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Second Transition (2nd ed., 2023). His work regularly appears in the Spanish, US, and Dutch media, including CTXT, The Nation, and De Groene Amsterdammer.
Gonzalo Torné (b. 1976) is a novelist, essayist, and translator from Barcelona. His most recent novel is Brujería (2024). In 2025, Anagrama republished his prize-winning debut novel, Hilos de sangre (2010). Together with Ignacio Echevarría, he coedits the cultural supplement of the magazine CTXT.
Peter Bush (b. 1946) has translated a wide range of literary texts from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese, including authors like Josep Pla, Joan Sales, Mercè Rodoreda, Fernando de Rojas, Juan Goytisolo, and Juan Carlos Onetti. An active promotor of literary translation, he has held academic positions and served in professional organisations.