Catalan | Poetry (excerpts) | Spain
September, 2019I first encountered about a dozen poems of Gemma Gorga in an anthology of contemporary Catalan poets translated into English while I was at an artist’s residency in Barcelona. I was struck by the lucid transparency of her language and syntax as a means for revealing transcendent states. I spent the next few years translating her book of prose poems, Llibre dels minuts (Book of Minutes, Field Translation Series, Oberlin College Press, 2019). Yet I still felt compelled by the rest of her work, which makes abundant use of the verse line. Now I am translating poems from her six other books, and eventually newer uncollected poems, which I hope to edit and translate into a volume of her Selected Poems, tentatively titled Late to the House of Words.
The selection of poems here are all from her third book, Instruments òptics (Brosquil Edicions, 2005). Even its title underlines Gorga’s central preoccupation with poems as being themselves “optical instruments” that can help us see what even a telescope or a microscope cannot: that is, the workings of the human soul through memory.
Yet Gorga’s poems are obsessively focused on words themselves: their enigmatic palpability as well as their sound. Thus, in a poem such as “In Alphabetical Order,” Gorga finds the magic key to certain words by their proximity in the dictionary to others. There was no way to achieve in English the same effect that Gorga could do, where the search for “you” in the final line: (“tu, tul, tulipa, túmul, turment”) is constructed from the letters of tu (you), something I could only approximate in English and instead found myself compensating and resorting to homophony: “you: yarrow, yaw, yawp, yew.” In writing this introduction, I had a moment of translator’s regret. I believe that a translation is never finished, merely abandoned--to repurpose Valéry. I thought about changing the line to “we,” a word whose two-letter form earlier in our alphabet would have allowed me more room to do an analogous architectonic procedure, but at too great an expense to the sense of this crucial final line. For it is the very search for the Other through language that underpins the entire poem, and which forms part of Gorga’s lyric project. In many of these poems, even when they evoke solitude, there is the assumption of the other. In “Pomegranates,” the solitary act of peeling and extracting its seeds effects a powerful inversion of number and agency, where instead of the singular narrator eating seeds, it is the seeds of “Time” that “gobble us up.”
The poems comprising her “Book of Hours” are, of course, concerned with cycles of Time passing, of mortality. In “The Book of Hours: October,” for example, Gorga uses the season to allude to the Classical theme of souls falling like leaves, an image found as far back as Dante and Virgil. She transforms it slightly by comparing the leaves to angels falling, who are then able to escape from the endless repetition “to transport them to another/less painful dimension.” In the very act of creating these secular prayers, Gorga is able to achieve a momentary transcendence for herself and, by reading them, for the reader.
- Sharon Dolin
In late 1960, a little-known writer by the name of Mercè Rodoreda entered an unpublished novel, Colometa, for competition in that year’s distinguished Premi Sant Jordi. She did not win. The book did, however, make quite an impression on Joan Fuster, who sat on the prize committee. Convinced the committee had made an awful mistake, Fuster wrote to his good friend Joan Sales. Just five years prior, Sales had co-founded the press Club dels Novel·listes—recently re-baptized Club Editor—and was ever on the hunt for exciting new novelists to add to his roster. “See what you can do,” Fuster said. So Sales sent a letter to this writer whose novel had so dazzled his friend. It was a decision he was not to regret. Two years later, Club Editor published In Diamond Square to instant popular acclaim. More than fifty years later, the novel continues to sell. It has been translated into more than thirty languages, and has seen adaptation to the stage as well as the silver screen. Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez even called it the most beautiful novel to be published in Spain since the end of the Civil War.
The letters featured here are culled from the correspondence that brought this novel into being. They represent the early and often tempestuous days of one of the most important friendships in modern Catalan literary history, a relationship that would last for more than twenty years, until Rodoreda’s death. Now, they stand as a testament to the fastidiousness and insight, even the ego, of two of the most beloved figures in this little nation’s exceptionally vast literary tradition.
- Scott Shanahan
Catalan | Short Fiction | Spain
September, 2013Toni Sala (b. 1969, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Girona) is an author of fiction and nonfiction as well as a secondary school teacher of Catalan literature. His books include the short story collections Entomologia (1997) and Bones notícies (2001); the novels Pere Marín (1998), Goril·la blanc (2002), Rodalies (2004, Sant Joan Prize and the National Prize for Catalan Literature), and Quatre dies a l'Àfrica (2005); and the book-length essay Petita crònica d'un professor a secundària (2001), a controversial bestseller in which the author exposed the frustration prevalent among educators with disarming sincerity and raw candor.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
November, 2012The Silent Woman is a novel that traces the events of the twentieth century and their dramatic influence on people's lives. Sylva, half-German and half-Czech, is born into an aristocratic family in a sumptuous castle near Prague. With her husband, an ambassador in Paris, and later with her Russian boyfriend, Sylva witnesses the joyful madness of the 1920s and then the Nazi period of the '30s and '40s. During the Communist era, she loses all of her property and all of her loved ones. In the '70s, a lonely old woman forgotten by all, she ends up living in a poor neighbourhood. That's when she discovers the fate of her long-lost boyfriend: the Soviet regime had banished him to a Gulag. Sylva's search for him begins...
We also follow Sylva's son Jan, a world-famous mathematician who immigrates to the U.S. He earns a fortune, but struggles for understanding in his marriage to a beautiful Russian parvenu.
Catalan | Short Fiction | Spain
August, 2012No Third Parties Are Involved is a collection of ten stories about the follies of modern life. They feature a mix of odd situations--ridiculous, decadent, comic, or endearing--and a broad array of characters that includes a Nobel Prize-winning writer, a journalist who doesn't use a tape recorder or notebook, a late-night game show host, and an actress who has turned the corner into middle age. Author Empar Moliner presents--as she usually does--sketches of the everyday whose authenticity can touch a nerve, as many people, men and women alike, can easily recognize aspects of themselves in her characters. With her customary energy, she portrays situations of contemporary urban life through a filter of perceptive irony: Empar Moliner strips the world naked, amid wine, music, the internet, drugs and the city.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
April, 2010Mill Town Memories is a captivating novel that holds the reader's attention with a skillful non-linear narrative technique. It immerses the reader in an industrial era, depicting life in one of the textile colonies that were such a vital part of Catalonia in the 1950s (the author lived in the Colonia Vidal from the age of six months until she was 20). It is a portrait of the heartland of Catalonia: its traditions, customs, and pressures to conform.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010Due to the physical after-effects of a fateful traffic accident, a waiter in a roadside bar finds himself forced to give up his job and withdraw into himself. In this situation and out of the need to do something—anything—he resumes his old pastime of voracious reading, and begins to write. In an exercise of reminiscence superimposed on the most immediate present, the story becomes a magnificent and careful intertwining of crossed paths, encounters and misunderstandings among a wide variety of characters that were once part of the microcosm of the roadside bar. When he was working there he unwittingly became a witness to the ever-complicated human psyche, and to an everyday reality verging on decadence and disillusionment with a changing world shrouded in an atmosphere of pessimism. Ramon Erra's extraordinary literary precision establishes him as one of the best current writers of Catalan fiction.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010A Lake in Flames is a first novel, and also the first part of a trilogy that continues with The Sea of Minsk (La mar de Minsk) and Towers of Clay (Torres d'argila) and marks Hilari de Cara's birth as a novelist. In this chronicle of characters and stories that touch on life, memory, hopes and ambitions, and sex, the author addresses his themes with sarcasm and, above all, a certain sense of terminus. The parallel plots are set in a village in present-day Mallorca and the Mallorca of the past; in the Barcelona of the 1970s and the Spanish Civil War. The novel is grounded in its author's own personal experience, but is developed with irony and a style close to contemporary English-language fiction.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
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