Do you know of any books that were written as a part of the modernisme movement? Have any of them been translated? Thank you for your time and dedication to informing us on Catalan culture, it is truly beautiful 🧡🧡
Hello! Yes, there is some very interesting Modernist literature.
First of all, I want to introduce two websites for Catalan literature in other languages.
First, lletrA. This is a project by the UOC university in Catalonia where you can browse authors of Catalan literature and read about them in English, Spanish or Catalan. It also includes links to compilations of poems by the author or fragments in the case of novels, but these aren’t always translated.
Secondly, visat.cat. It’s the page of a digital magazine about translation in and from Catalan. In this page, you can look for any Catalan author and find if their books have been translated to other languages. You can also find poems and fragments of novels translated in this website.
Now, to Modernist literature.
For poetry, the most famous is the work of Joan Maragall (1860-1911). You can read about him in this PDF by the Anglo-Catalan Society or on lletrA’s page for him.
According to visat.cat, two books by Maragall have been published in English: Count Arnau & other poems of Joan Maragall (translation by Michael Odom, Maostrap Books, 2017) and One Day of Life is Life Joan Maragall (translation by Ronald Puppo, London/Barcelona: Fum d'Estampa Press, 2020).
When it comes to novels, the most famous author is Víctor Català (a male pseudonym for Caterina Albert, she had to publish under a male name since her books were considered too gruesome to be written by a woman). Her work often describes harsh realities, similar to the Realism and Naturalism literary movements. You can read about her in visat.cat.
Her most famous book is Solitude (“Solitud”), published in 1904-1905, a highly symbolic novel about the self-discovery of a woman named Mila. This is the summary:
"Solitude" tells the story of Mila, a peasant girl who makes the mistake of marrying an ineffectual if guileless fellow called Matias and going to live with him in a hermitage high in the mountains. Mila at first finds the dramatic vistas overwhelming. Gradually, however, she adjusts to the unfamiliar and frightening landscape as well as to the harsh, wintry life of the ancient complex where she and Matias serve as caretakers. But each falls under the spell of a different local and a different way of life. The twin seductions of husband and wife lead to inevitable and dire consequences.
Solitude was published in English in 1992, translation by David H. Rosenthal (Columbia, Readers International).
The other most famous text by Víctor Català / Caterina Albert is The Child Killer (“La infanticida”), a theatre monologue written in 1898 and which made her first become a renowned author. It follows the thoughts of a woman who has been sent to a mental asylum after having killed her son.
If you’re interested in the experiences of women in a highly male-controlled society, morality, and even the topic of abortion, as well as love and “women’s madness”, you might like The Child Killer. I have to mention, though, that it has some very violent sections. Sadly, it seems like it hasn’t been translated to English, but I still wanted to mention it because of its relevance.
And this leads to my favourite...
Here we have Santiago Rusiñol! He was also a painter (you can find some of his paintings in this blog’s #santiago rusiñol tag) but he wrote great comedies. It doesn’t seem like his work has been translated to English, and to be honest it would be quite difficult because his plays are constant puns and references. But I still want to mention him in case he gets translated in the future.
One of his most famous works is the 1902 play Els jocs florals de Canprosa, which more or less translates to “The Floral Games of Prose-house” (Floral Games are a Catalan poetry competition that started in the Middle Ages and was done again by the Renaixença -the literary movement before Modernism- which is similar to Romanticism). In this play, Rusiñol makes fun of the Renaixença movement and the ways that the previous generation had fought for the same ideas of preserving and renovating Catalan language and literature.
Another one is L’hèroe (“The Hero”), about a pretentious soldier who comes back from fighting in the Spanish army in the Cuban War of Independence. It’s an anti-militarist play that was very brave for making fun of the Spanish defeat only a few years after it happened: Cuba won the war and became independent in , and the theatre play premiered in 1903.
Another of my favourites is El bon policia (“The Good Policeman”), an ironic title. This is a less famous play from 1905, considered one of his minor ones, but it’s very funny and I loved it so I’m including it. It’s about a poor man who has no other option than to become a policeman (for the desperation of him, his husband, and everyone), but he’s too good for such a job and gets into funny situations with the people he is sent to arrest and with with superiors. This play is also manifestly in favour homosexuality, a topic that it treats in a very natural way.
Rusiñol also has love theatre like El pati blau (“The Blue Patio”) and L’alegria que passa (“The happiness that passes by”).
That’s the main ones, though of course there were more authors. As always, if anyone who reads this post wants to add more, you are welcome to do so in the reblogs or in the comments!
