Category Catalan
Translating Joan Sales, or, How to Preserve Impurity: Sebastiaan Faber Interviews Gonzalo Torné and Peter Bush
The fact that “Incerta glòria” (Uncertain Glory) 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.
Breaking the Ice: On Eva Baltasar’s “Permafrost,” translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches
By Eva Dunsky You wouldn’t want to be clocked by the narrator of Eva Baltasar’s Permafrost. She has an effortless way of sussing out the thing that will devastate you most and then stating it as a pithy one-liner. “Being the bearer of important news: the only climax Mom has ever known” (50). This, after […]
Shifting Sands: Mercè Rodoreda’s “Garden by the Sea,” Translated from Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent
By Eva Dunsky In Garden by the Sea, translated by the mother-daughter team Martha Tennant and Maruxa Relaño, Rodoreda writes a slow burn towards catastrophe. Rodoreda, who is considered one of the most important Catalan writers of the 20th century, wrote often about Catalan society in the years before and after the Spanish Civil War, […]
Everyday Illuminations: Gemma Gorga’s “Book of Minutes,” Translated from Catalan by Sharon Dolin
By Mary Ann Newman Unlike American poetry, Catalan poetry tends to shun the confessional or the directly personal. To revive a Lacanian phrase, Catalan poetry is always already political. A language and a literature that suffered continual interruptions owing to lost wars and various repressions—the 1714 War of Succession, the 1923 dictatorship of Primo de […]