X-Games 2013, also in Barcelona (May 16-19)

For the first time, the X-Games will take place in six different venues, one of these being the Catalan capital Barcelona. The Wikipedia has this article on the event in general. The city of Barcelona's tourism website is here.

A Catalan sculptor: Jaume Plensa

El País has this article in English on the winner of the Spanish National Plastic Arts Award. His official homepage is here; the Wikipedia has this entry.

Why Spain is top for Erasmus

An article from El País here.

"The Guardian" focussing on Catalonia

A few days before the Catalan parliamentary elections on Nov. 25, the British newspaper The Guardian offers four different items on Catalonia today: an article, an interactive guide, a video, another article on Artur Mas, and one on spreading separatism. And more coverage here.

The BBC on Catalonia

The link is here.

Spain's Inditex in the New York Times Magazine

One of Spain's most successful companies (fashion retailer, ZARA et al.) portrayed here.

The NY Times on Spain's home evictions

A harsh reality that has already led people to suicide in crisis-ridden Spain, taken up by The New York Times here.

Quim Monzo: Oh! Europe

Catalan writer Quim Monzó published on Nov. 9 his daily column in La Vanguardia newspaper with the above title.

It reads more or less like this:

[The head of the regional government of Catalonia, Arthur] Mas went [this week] to Brussels to explain that Catalonia is an old European nation; that Spain, instead of dialogue it offers shouts; that, if we get to that occasion, "we will demand shelter from the European Union, appealing to the democratic values of its foundation;" and that, in the same way that "Catalonia in all of its history has never failed Europe, we hope that Europe will not let down Catalonia."

Oh, ingenious! It is exactly because a great part of Europe let us down three centuries ago, there happened what happened. Britain, Austria, Portugal and the United Provinces betrayed their accord with Catalonia and left it without protection and at the mercy of Philipp V. This disloyalty was so obvious that in 1714 the House of Lords held sessions in which it debated the situation in which it had left the Catalans. They even published two books on the affair: "The case of the Catalans considered", and "Deplorable history of the Catalans"; a manner of self-criticism of the treason that ended with the Treaty of Utrecht. That Europe is not the modern one, but I would not put a lot of trust in the latter one, either.

You can read more on the House of Lord's activities here. Google books offers this book.

Nov. 2: 75th anniversary - bombardment of Lleida

Agustí Centelles, Bombardeig de Lleida, 1937 [(c) mnac.cat]

A short summary of the facts from a text accompanying an exhibiton by the Memorial Democràtic (1):

"Until March 1938, Lleida was the most important Catalan city of the Republican rearguard near the Aragon front. As a result, it was a place where troops passed through and it had a frontline hospital and a shelter for people retreating from the onslaught of Franco’s army. Its strategic location made it a primary target of the fascist air raids. On the 2nd November 1937, one of the cruellest attacks of the Civil War took place when nine Italian three-engine aeroplanes deployed their bombs on the city’s main thoroughfares, particularly damaging the secondary school and the Sant Lluís market. With the bombardment of the school, an institution associated with freedom of education was attacked and it became a symbol of innocent victims of the war. At least 250 people were killed in the attack, including around 50 girls and boys who were students at the school."

The school "incident" has got its own Wikipedia article here. According to some bloggers, the local historian Mercè Barallat believes that the school was targeted expressly due to its libertarian ideas.

A short Internet search leads one to a text by Josep Pla and Antonio Ruiz Mostany, published on the website of La Mañana newspaper in 2011, that gives a slightly different version at least as to the motivation behind the attack. The text, entitled "The truth about the bombardment of Lleida", cites the original orders to the flying squad found at the archives of the Italian airforce in Rome. Reading these it turns out that the bombardment of the town of Lleida (secondary target) was undertaken due to the cloudy weather above the principal target of the bombardment: the chemical industry of the town of Flix on the banks of the Ebro river. According to this article, Flix as a center of explosives' production was a legitimate military target. The tragedy was that the same (incendiary) bombs meant for an industrial site were then strewn over a town centre. As the planes stayed at a height of 4.200 to 3.600 metres so as not to become artillery targets themselves, the bombardment was a rather crude affair; apart from causing a massacre among the civilian population, a lot of bombs ended up inside the river Segre and on the farmland around Lleida. The authors remark that the report of the bombardment by the Italian aviation changed from one echelon to the next: whereas the lower ones talked openly about bombing bridges, factories and "military concentrations", the highest ones - reporting to their Spanish allies - only talk about bombing "a bridge in the vicinity of Lleida". As to the victims, Pla and Ruiz Mostany talk about 251 dead and 750 wounded.

The classic comprehensive studies on the Spanish Civil War have been written by A. Beevor, P. Preston and T. Hughes. Those concentrating on the war in Catalonia, e.g. by Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté, have not been translated into English (yet).

Endnote:
(1): Memorial Democràtic is a public institution funded by the Generalitat (regional government of Catalonia) that studies and divulges the history of Catalunya during the period of 1931 to 1980, i.e. from the second Spanish republic to the restoration of democracy after Franco's death.

Spanish National Literature Award for Javier Marías

The writer and scholar Javier Marías (Madrid, 1951) has won the Premio Nacional de Literatura [National Literature Award] in the "Narrative" section for his novel The Infatuations, to be published in the English version on March 7, 2013. This prize affirms the novel's double success - among the reading public and the critics - since its publication in Spanish 18 months ago. The award is endowed with 20.000 EUR and awarded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports to the best work of narrative published in 2011 in one of Spain's four official languages: Castilian, Galician, Basque, and Catalan.

The newspaper El País's literary supplement Babelia nominated The Infatuations Spain's book of the year 2011. On that occasion fellow writer and friend of Marías', Eduardo Mendoza, wrote: "[The novel] appears to have been written without any external or internal pressure, with absolute liberty, one of the clearest and fullest of its author, ... Only thus can be explained that he could adopt without any apparent effort or artifice a feminine voice and keep it up without fissures over 400 pages."

The novel does not talk about love but about infatuations, its state and states, and how this can "contaminate" a person. There are present various of Marías' regular topics: chance or luck, the search for truth in everyday questions, betrayal and its sequels, appearances, the things left unspoken, the memory and the presence of the deaths and their influence on the living. 

The Infatuations is Marías' novel number 11, or 13 if one counts every volume of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy independently. In it, Marías uses a female narrator for the first time. It comes after the just mentioned trilogy, finished in 2007. At that time, the fatigued writer thought he would not write anything else. But then emerged María Dolz, the narrating character and what looked to become a short novel turned out a 401-page volume in its Spanish version (352 in the English hardcover version).

As usual, according to Mendoza, "Marías does not write in a lineal or orthodox manner: he scatters the text so that the narration does not flow through cleanly drawn channels but through a natural riverbed, uneven, in which there are meanders, swirls and overflows; without ever loosing neither the direction nor the discourse's ultimate control. This mix of chaos and rigor requires an enviable mastery of the narrative technique, as demonstrated by the use of the measured anacoluthon as a literary recourse, that shocks teachers and inspectors, but that reflects so well reality's perception on the go; a precipitated perception, as sagacious as it is contradictory, and in which intervene intelligence, emotions, prejudices and limitations in a complementary and antagonistic manner." 

Marías revises these days the covers of the novel's editions in Norwegian, Finnish and English, that will all keep the image of the Spanish original.

[This is an unofficial translation of most of Winston Manrique Sabogal's article published on Oct. 25, 2012, in El País.com]

Marías does not accept any awards by state institutions, parties, etc. as he does not want to be seen as "tainted" by any political party, power, etc.  What is more, he opposes the current goverment's cuts in its cultural programs.

Penguin Modern Classics: Javier Marías

The news is from El País in English here. The titles already available in the Penguin Classics series here.

Planeta book prize 2012

Last night, the highest doted prize in literature after the Nobel, in the 61st edition of the Planeta book prize, was awarded to Lorenzo Silva (Madrid, 1966) for his novel La marca del meridiano ["The meridian's mark"; 600.000 EUR]; runner up was Mara Torres with La vida imaginaria ["The imaginary life"; 120.000 EUR].

Silva is best-known as author of the crime novel saga starring the "civilian guards" Bevilacqua and Chamorro. He started his literary career in 1995 with Noviembre sin violetas ["November without violets"], and in 2000 he received the Nadal book prize for El alquimista impaciente ["The impatient alquimist"]. Silva who is from Madrid and married to a Catalan, gave thanks for the prize with a short speech in Catalan and expressed his wish that there was never any more division between his beloved Madrid and his beloved Barcelona than the meridian, an imaginary line.
Apart from crime novels he also authored other works of fiction and non-fiction such as tales, articles, poetry and literary and historical essays. Up to the year 2000 he (also) worked as auditor, tax consultant, and lawyer, but from age 14 he has written.

The "Bevilacqua series" so far consists of:
El lejano país de los estanques ["The far-away ponds' country"],
El alquimista impaciente ["The impatient alquimist"],
Nadie vale más que otro. Cuatro asuntos de Bevilacqua ["Nobody's worth more than somebody else. Four Bevilacqua cases"],
La reina sin espejo ["The mirror-less queen"], and
La estrategia del agua ["The water strategy"].

Silva is considered an eminence in the field of crime novels as he is also the organizer of the crime novel festival Madrid Getafe Negro, and co-comissioner of the Santiago Negro festival in Santiago de Chile.

La Vanguardia newspaper, in which was published all of the above information, also highlights Silva's activities on Twitter and as a blogger of Los trabajos y los días ["The works and the days"], dedicated to his readers.

The Wikipedia has an article on Lorenzo Silva, but none of his works has been translated into English (so far).

Liber book fair

This week, from Oct. 2 to 5, took place the annual Liber book fair in Barcelona (taking turns with Madrid). Its official website in English is here.
A few notes, grasped from an article in La Vanguardia newspaper on Oct. 3:
Barcelona is the Spanish publishing capital with an annual turnover of 3 bn EUR; 75% of this comes from Spanish-language media. The national market is in recession: in 2011 it shrunk by 4,1%, this year it could be another reduction by 7%. There is some hope in rising exports to Latin America. This trade fair expected 7000 visitors with offers by 459 publishing houses and printing presses from 15 countries, and 459 internatial buyers from 54 countries. The guest country was Paraguay.
Commentators remarked the absence of some big players of the Spanish-language book market: Random House Mondadori, Anagrama, Tusquets, Edhasa were not represented.
They don't see much sense in a book fair that is only second for the Spanish language (the Guadalajara (Mexico) book fair is bigger), and that comes just before the biggest annual book fair in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
Topics of discussion were e.g. literature for the iPad, booktrailers, and the different VAT treatment in Spain of digital media (21%) and classical printed books (4%).

And article of El País newspaper book lovers might like, entitled "Reading for free in Madrid" here.

Catalonia making international headlines

Normally, Catalan nationalism has been an Iberian affair without much international attention. The massive demonstration on 09/11, Catalonia's national holiday (in memory of the surrender of Barcelona in 1714 - War of the Spanish Succession), that brought 1.5 million Catalans to the streets of Barcelona behind a banner "Catalonia - next state of Europe" has changed this.
The Financial Times had this editorial, the International Herald Tribune had this article and this, the Wall Street Journal's slide-show is here. The New York Times informed on Sept. 20 here, The Economist in its Sept. 22 edition here.

This blogger's perception is that there is no general majority for an independent state of Catalonia but an accumulated frustration with the central government in Madrid; in such a situation, independence seems to be a viable solution. This frustration has the following background: whereas federal republics such as Germany put a limit to the transfer payments of richer states to the poorer ones ("national solidarity") to prevent the originally richer ones from ending up poorer in infrastructures and public services than the originally poorer ones, Spain's constitution of 1978 does not include such limits, and Catalans see a lot of their wealth going to the poorer regions of Extremadura and Andalusia, that have very high rates of both, unemployment and people working in public sector jobs (30% in comparison to 13% in Catalonia). This fact has been known for years but the general economic crisis of the last five years has made it more perceptible as government spending has been drastically reduced, and Catalans have seen this in the areas of health, education, and infrastructures. Adding to this, Catalans feel that the Spaniards accuse them of being selfish in their efforts to pay less and despise their language, while the Basque Country and Navarra have enjoyed a fiscal regime that lets them keep a higher percentage of the taxes raised in their territories for themselves without making them a target of criticism.
Already in April, the Wall Street Journal had this article on the unwillingness of the Spanish central government to change the situation - the Catalan press took until this week to become aware of it...

Sept. 18, 2012: death of Santiago Carrillo

There remain fewer and fewer of the central figures of Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy in the mid-1970s. Yesterday Carrillo died at age 97, El País has an English obituary here. The English Wikipedia entry can be found here. Catalans liked him because he supported their efforts for independence.

Catalan industry: the Chinese to the rescue

A few days ago, the news announced that around 400 Catalan jobs will be saved due to an investment by a Chinese company in a bankrupt Catalan company put on sale by the liquidator. Jiaxipera, the compressor arm of Huanyi, a group controlled by the state-owned Sichuan Changhong company, will buy the Catalan compressor maker Cubigel at a price of 600.000 EUR and will be responsible for a credit of 2 M EUR received by the regional government's credit unit to take up production again. Jiaxipera has agreed to maintain 386 of the 551 jobs at Cubigel, with a 15% reduction in salaries though. The Chinese company will inject 3.5 M EUR immediately to revive Cubigel's cash-flow, and they plan to install a technical institute for compressors at the factory, that will do part of the group's I&D activities, and to convert their Catalan subsidiary into their logistics and commercial base for the European market.

[The information in this post comes from an original article published in La Vanguardia newspaper.]

El País asks "When will they move out?"

Massive youth unemployment, around 50% for those below 35, is one of the biggest problems of the Spanish economic crisis. A big part of these unemployed do not have any (tertiary) education, but there are also a lot of university grads struggling to find a job that would pay an independent living. Therefore, young (and not so young) people continue to live with their parents, do not get married, do not have children and thus in the long run will exacerbate the problems of an ageing society. El País has this article on the "lost generation".

Edicions 62: publisher celebrates 50th anniversary

The Catalan publishing house "Edicions 62" celebrates its 50th anniversary . During these years, the iconic publisher has put out 5,000 titles and actually it controls a catalog of over 2,000 authors, 47 of whom are Nobel laureates.
El manoscrito del segon origen ["The manuscript of the second origin"] by Manuel de Pedrolo, is the publisher's bestselling book, with more than one million copies. Its catalog also includes key works such as Nosaltres, els valencians ["We, the Valencians"] by Joan Fuster, the first book published by Edicions 62 on May 12, 1962. Created by Max Cahner and Ramon Bastardes, it had to overcome the objective of the government of the time that wanted to put away with the Catalan language and culture that they considered provincial.
Josep Maria Castellet, another member of the founding generation, had these remarks on the radio program "Senses" on Catalunya Informació: "They wanted to keep it as a provincial culture, where the ideal would be that writers write in Catalan for a Catalan audience speaking about nothing else but Catalonia, the sardana dance and folklore. I think that's why we had difficulties in publishing foreign books that we had started to translate immediately."
This Thursday, Edicions 62 commemorates its anniversary with a ceremony at CaixaForum, where the  president of the Generalitat [regional government] Artur Mas as well as writers and editors will attend. There has also been published a special catalog with a cover illustrated by the artist Jaume Plensa, and in October there will start an exhibition.

(The original piece appeared on 324.cat in Catalan here.)

Note: Like most of the Catalan and Spanish publishers, Edicions 62 is not totally independent any longer but forms part of the Planeta publishing empire; this blogger does not know the exact participation but estimates that Planeta controls around 50% of Edicions 62. Edicions 62 publishes 50%+ of all titles published in Catalan.

Catalonia tourism promotion via social media

The Catalan news site 324.cat reports here the following:

Nine bloggers, specialized in tourism, are visiting Catalonia these days, invited by the regional government


     Nine of the most influential bloggers in the realm of tourism and recreation are in Catalonia these days to explain their experiences as tourists via their blogs, facebook entries and tweets. They are from the United States, Canada, and the UK, and during this week will visit different sights of Catalonia. The Catalunya Tourism Board, organizer of the trip, hopes to entice their numerous followers - on Twitter alone they sum more than 260.000 - to come here as well; it's already the second "blogotrip" they organize.
     One can follow the bloggers' impressions with the hash tag #catalunyaexperience. They are all collected on a page called bloctrip, and on facebook. Counting all of the visits to the different channels, they sum up around 2 million.
     The trip started last Saturday with a tour of modernist (Art Nouveau) Barcelona. On Sunday, the group visited the F1 race at the Montmelo circuit. They then went on to Lleida and the Pirineus mountains for adventure sports and star gazing. Other places on their route are a "clam farm" in Sant Carles de la Ràpita, living in first person the "human towers" of Vilafranca del Penedes, and seeing the Tarraco Viva festival next Sunday.
     A similar experience takes place at the counties of Girona. Seven bloggers have visited the city of Girona, dived off the coast of Estartit, and did skydiving at Empuriabrava. On can follow their experiences on Twitter or blogtrip.

My first impression of the bloctrip page is that the people sharing their experiences there know what they are doing, and especially the photos really make you want to visit these places, too ...

36 Hours in Barcelona (The NY Times)

The article was published here on May 3. Enjoy!

National Gallery: Joan Miró, May 6 - Aug 12, 2012

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will host a major exhibition of Joan Miró.
The official information is here, the Washington Post has this. Already on display are the paintings by Miró of the Kreeger Museum, more information on their website here. Again by the WP here.
The exhibition at the National Gallery will be accompanied by some typical dishes at the museum's Garden Café restaurant, under the supervision of Chef José Andrés, the Huffington Post reports here.
If you want to update your knowledge of Joan Miró, the Wikipedia offers an extensive article here.

E-books from Barcelona - in English

Spanish daily El País reports today that the publishing house Roca Editorial has created a new label called "Barcelona e-books" that will publish English translations of books by primarily Spanish authors. They work in partnership with Michael Gordon (Noah Gordon's son) and the US distributor Open Road Media, and they will have offices in Barcelona and New York. (Open Road's complete press release is here).
This new label focuses on the British, Canadian and US markets; in the latter, e-books already account for 30% of all book sales. Among the first titles to be published in summer are The Winemaker by Noah Gordon, Things that happen to you in Barcelona when you are 30 by Llúcia Ramis, "The lost princess" by Maha Aktar, "Wendolin Kramer" by Laura Fernández, An American in Barcelona: The Man Who Brought Light to Catalonia by Xavier Moret, and "The dream of Paris" by Vicenç Villatoro (winner of the 2010 Ramon Llull prize; the author is now the president of that institution).
The first novels all have got a heavy "Barcelona local color" as Americans represent the biggest group of tourists to the Catalan capital, and they can be bought through amazon.com, i-bookstore, barnesandnoble.com,  Google/Indie Bound, Kobo Books, Over Drive, and the Sony Reader Store.
The article further explains that Roca's distribution partner Open Road works differently than traditional Spanish publishing houses, with a lot more stress on the new media, social networks, and peer-to-peer publicity. Apart from e-books, the new label will also (re-)publish Noah Gordon's works in paper format, starting with The Winemaker and The Physician.

Catalan writers: Gabriel Ferrater

Today 40 years ago he took his life. Both, the Wikipedia article here and another note by the Catalan PEN here, are quite short.

Today: 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica

The Wikipedia has this article on the event. History Today offers this 2007 article by Paul Preston.
Spanish daily El País offers this article (in English).
The Basque public television EITB, here, offers inedited photos, videos, and other material (in Spanish).
Spanish public television TVE has this material on the anniversary (in Spanish).

Carme Riera becomes member of Royal Spanish Academy

This week, the Majorcan author Carme Riera became the eighth woman to enter the Royal Spanish Academy.

Riera will sit on chair "N" of a body that consists of 46 chairs. She is a professor of Spanish Literature, specialized in the "Golden Age", and writes Catalan fiction.
The academy is an institution whose members elect their new fellow members. The remarkable here is not only that they chose a woman but also that they elected a Catalan writer into the "temple of the Spanish letters". Riera was presented as a candidate by Catalan writer Pere Gimferrer together with Álvaro Pombo and the historian Carmen Iglesias and was also supported by the prestigious literary agent Carmen Balcells.
The new academy member was born in Palma de Mallorca in 1948 and lived there until she went to Barcelona in 1965 to study Spanish philology. Today she teaches Spanish Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She specializes in the Spanish Golden Age and offers writing workshops. Her doctoral thesis on the poetic school of Barcelona won an extraordinary prize; she later rewrote it into an essay that won the Anagrama prize in 1988.
As a novel writer, Riera has won numerous prizes, among these the Prudenci Bertrana Novel prize for Una primavera per a Domenico Guarini ("A spring for D.G.") in 1980; the Ramon Llull Novel prize for Jocs de miralls ("Mirror Games") in 1989; and the Josep Pla, Lletra d'Or, Joan Crexells and National Narrative for Spanish Letters prizes for Dins el darrer blau [engl. title: In the last blue, available on amazon.com] in 1994.
She also won the Catalan National Literature prize awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya [government of the autonomous region] for Cap al cel obert ("To the wide open sky") in 2001, and the Sant Jordi novel prize for La meitat de l'ànima ("Half of the soul") in 2003. In 2000 she received, the Creu de Sant Jordi ("Cross of St. George" - highest civil honor in Catalonia), in 2002  the Ramon Llull prize, and in 2005 the Gold Medal of the Majorcan government.
Riera's investigative work has shown outstanding results in her studies on Spanish 20th century poetry, with a special focus on José Agustín Goytisolo and Carlos Barral, as well as on female literature.
When she learned of her election, she told the EFE news agency, with reference to her double status as Spanish and Catalan writer, that "languages are kind of a crystal through which we see the world, and I can see it through these two languages." And she added: "I am lucky to teach literature in the morning, and to write it in the afternoon."
(The original article by Pedro Vallín was published in La Vanguardia newspaper on April 20, 2012. This is an unauthorized, approximate translation of some parts of the article.)

Rasquera: a Catalan village wants to allow marihuana plantation to end crisis

The English coverage ("Where there's smoke, there's ire") comes from El País daily here.

April 15, 2012: Titanic - and other anniversaries

Being slightly aware of the news these days, one cannot have missed that today 100 years ago, the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in the middle of the Atlantic. A search in the US version of google.news leads to more than 45.000 results. The basic facts are presented in this Wikipedia article. The BBC presents a whole series of articles, documentaries, historic material here and here.
Several cruise ships have set out to take the same route as did the Titanic 100 years ago, and memorial services were held at the spot were it sank and in Halifax, Canada, were a lot of the corpses turned up and were buried shortly after the catastrophe (on the cruises: The Chronicle Herald offers this article, and a special section on the anniversary [whose aethetics is very close to the movie by James Cameron (the Wikipedia lists 26 movies on the event)]; The Guardian has this article; on Halifax, cf. the article by the Winnipeg Free Press here). The Spanish daily El País has this article (in English) on the Spaniards among the 1,517 victims.

The Washington Post offers an interesting blog entry on the oversaturated media coverage of this anniversary, here.

Another "catastrophic event" today 100 years ago was the birth of Kim Il-Sung (the Wikipedia article here), though this became apparent only a few decades later - and we do not believe that history is made by "great men" alone...

An aside to an event that has had little media coverage (especially after the king's hunting accident, cf. BBC coverage here): on April 14, 1962, i.e. 50 years ago, the future King Juan Carlos I was married to Greek princess Sofia. (Update: I learned that it was May 14: no wonder, there were no festivities nor media coverage)

To end this post with a positive note: the day the Titanic hit the iceberg (April 14, 1912) also saw the birth of Robert Doisneau, to become one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.

Catalonia: prostitution making headlines of the NYT

An article on prostitution and trafficking of women in La Jonquera, the main frontier town between Catalonia and France, is among the most widely read of the New York Times these days. Whereas the rest of the economy is in shambles, this "business" is flourishing, with a lot of "customers" coming over from France.
The article is thorough and shows the contradictions of Spain's policy on prostitution: the act in itself is not illegal, but pimping is. Mayors do not want to have it on their streets, but they are happy to collect taxes from certain "hotels". Trafficking with women is illegal but there are very few convictions. Even respectable newspapers have two to four pages full of small adds for "sexual services" every day.
"In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism" by Suzanne Daley, published April 6, is here, the accompanying pictures here.

Authors from Catalonia: Enrique Vila-Matas

Enrique Vila-Matas is from Barcelona, lives there, and on March 31 he celebrated his 64th birthday, but he is not a Catalan author as he writes in Spanish. His official website is here; the part in English and on translations of his works into English here. Amazon.com lists four of his works in English, the last of these still to be released. Interestingly, they come cheaper in their translated version then in their Spanish original...

Bartleby&Co. here and an interesting overview of reviews of this novel here
Montano's Malady here
Never Any End to Paris here and an interview with this author on this book from The Paris Review here (and links to reviews in English and German here)
Dublinesque here, to be released in English on June 7, 2012

Québec Book Fair: Catalan literature as guest of honor (April 11-15, 2012)

This seems to be a strictly French-speaking event... the official website is here, the book fair's program here. Background information on the Catalan authors who will be present can be found here (French only).
Catalan nationalists often look enviously at Québécois nationalists who already managed to hold referenda on independence in the past - though they like to overlook that these always ended in favour of the union with the rest of Canada.

Spanish politics: finally a budget for 2012

Yesterday the central government in Madrid revealed its budget plans for this year. It's sad to see that they will virtually give up on development aid to the world's poorest. The Wall Street Journal reports extensively here; it seems that it is still way to early to know if Spain will overcome its by now already 5-year-old crisis - or if it will need an official rescue like that of Ireland and Greece.

update 03.04.2012: the WSJ offers an interview with Spain's finance minister here.

Jaume Cabré, an interview [exercises in translation]

This is an unauthorized translation of an interview of the writer Jaume Cabré (JC) by Víctor-M. Amela (VMA), published on the back-cover of La Vanguardia newspaper on March 7, 2012.

Jaume Cabré, writer. I am 64 years old. I was born in Barcelona and live in Matadepera. I am married to Margarida and we have two children, Martí (37) and Clara (31), and one grand-child. I am a Catalan independent. I am agnostic but it hurts me that they use God to justify violence. Hell is that the devil does not exist.

"Educate is to teach the young person to be totally alone by him-/herself"


VMA: Why do you write?
JC: I wanted to be a musician: I play the violin, but I am not good enough...
VMA: And why musician?
JC: When I was little, at home we had a piano that my parents played with four hands... I also wanted to be a firefighter, Pope...
VMA: The Pope of Rome?
JC: A gentleman in disguise who was treated so well by everybody... I was enchanted!
VMA: Afterwards you wrote about Pope Luna...
JC: That there were different popes and that all considered the others heretics fascinated me. The one who wins declares all the others anti-popes and writes the History! What's the truth?
VMA: So, you write because you do not play the violin?
JC: Art hides some frustration, a lack that you alleviate by playing the lute, writing...
VMA: The artistic drive as a therapy.
JC: If you feel that you cannot live without following this drive, you have to follow it!
VMA: "If you see yourself able not to write, then don't write," said Borges' father to him.
JC: I haven't been able to live without writing! For some years I was a secondary school teacher, came home, corrected exams, spent time with my children... and in the early morning hours, I wrote! It was hard, but the teaching was harder: winning over the students, have them participate, excite them...
VMA: What would you do to improve the education?
JC: The parents keep themselves totally away, they delegate all to the school. If a father complains that his son doesn't read, ask him: "And you, do you read?".
VMA: To broaden responsibilities, I see.
JC: We live in a society that gives priority to a TV program on the question of a footballer's depilation over another about the History of Europe.
VMA: You find this worrying?
JC: I am discourage by the superficiality that you note in the incapacity to be alone by ourselves. Educating means teaching the young to be alone by him-/herself.
VMA: Socializing culture maybe banalizes it.
JC: I believe that it is possible to extend and democratize culture without necessarily degrading it or taking down the bar. What I am really worried about is the contempt for the study of the Humanities...
VMA: Why?
JC: If we let us carry away by an extreme utilitarianism, we will give up studying Greek and Latin, then Geography, then Philosophy, and finally History... All that makes us "cultured" and able to judge, structured persons! Just the subjects that everybody should study..., and later on, let them enter deeper into whatever subject they like.
VMA: I sign that!
JC: It all starts with being badly educated..., and then you abuse your partner..., and then you use your fist, and like this we arrive at Auschwitz.
VMA: Do you not dramatize a little here?
JC: No, the drama is that the bad resides in you. Hell consists of the fact that the devil does not exist.  
VMA: What is your idea of the bad?
JC: To pretend to do good seems very pretentious to me... Trying to not to do bad is already a lot! Look at the ecological footprint..
VMA: What does it have?
JC: Even the person that does not want to contaminate at all ends up contaminating a little. We are no angels! And a grain of sand ends up stopping a big machine: i starts with a bad gesture and ...
VMA: For example?
JC: To call a Catalan "Polish" is a beginning, comparable to the Nazis that called the Jew "rat".
VMA: Do we have to learn pluralism?
JC: We have to learn that Europe's common language is not English: it's translation! Umberto Eco says this. The European reality is plurilingual and this is a treasure!
VMA: You write in Catalan?
JC: We do not live in a country, we live in a language. I live in the Catalan language. A language that was prohibited: that is a fact that surprises a lot when you explain it around the world...
VMA: In how many languages have your works already been translated?
JC: Into twenty-something, including Spanish! I am very satisfied because of the reluctance of Spanish readers towards us, authors who write in Catalan.
VMA: Why is that?
JC: The Catalans read authors who write in Spanish but it does not happen vice-versa. And it hurts me. I heard in a restaurant in Spain a group of guests that did not want the Catalan wines for their provenance... and that hurts!
VMA: Your latest novel will be a bestseller. And what will you write next?
JC: It took me eight years to write I confess. Now... I have to wait. 
VMA: Wait for what?
JC: That I am dominated again by this necessity to write something else.
VMA: And right now, how are you?
JC: Right now, this is not the case. But I suspect that something will arrive, something will arrive...
VMA: You also wrote serials and TV series.
JC: The first serial that was made in Spain, La granja [The farm], with Puyal... I worked very well, I earned money.
VMA: What advice would you give to those who want to write for TV?
JC: Visualize everything you write, describe gestures and looks, and write things that surprise yourself.
VMA: What's the secret of your novels?
JC: I have no idea! I only know that I put in my life, that I give my full dedication to writing. And the German critics say: "We have never seen this way of writing before".
VMA: You are read widely there, I understand.
JC: Yes, they have a lot of reading clubs, they read in school, they invite writers. I believe that if everybody read one book every year the world would be different! 
 

"I confess"

Jaume Cabré is currently the Catalan author par excellence for reasons of prizes, number of readers, and international impact. 

He receives me in the office where he writes, in a placid and sunny semi-detached house in front of a wooded mountain to talk about his latest book and a lot of other things. Cabré made his dream reality: to make a living of his fantasies, of what he writes. Being the author of TV and cinema scripts and novels such as Les veus del Pamano, Senyoria, L'ombra de l'eunuc and Fra Junoy o l'agonia dels sons, he now finds himself in literature's first line with Jo confesso (Proa) / Yo confieso (Destino), a great adventure that includes everything that good stories need to have and with European culture as background.

In English Amazon.com offers only one work of Jaume Cabré, Winter Journey, a selection of short stories.

An observation related to Crime Novel Week 2012

Last week saw another edition of "BCNegra" (Black Barcelona, i.e. Barcelona Crime Novel Week). One of the authors who came there was Roberto Saviano, famous and persecuted by the Mafia for Gomorrah, who talked about his latest book "Come, escape with me"  (that's the title in its Italian, Spanish and Catalan editions). On Wednesday, Feb. 8, he was cited in the local press as saying that "Spain is a paradise for all the European Mafia clans who have taken up there a second or their principal residence".
As if to prove his point, on Thursday, Feb. 9, Spanish police forces captured three Serbian mafiosi in Valencia: Luka Bojovic and Vladimir Milisavljevic, the Crazy One, members of the Zemum clan, considered the instigator and the material author, respectively, of the murder of Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003, plus Sinisa Petric, aka Baku, all of them members of the paramilitary group Arkan's Tigers during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The news article reporting on this also said that Bojovic's wife and kids had resided in different locations of Alicante province and the Canary Islands.
El País offers this article in English to explain how the assassins were captured.

Music festivals in Barcelona 2012

I still think that Barcelona is an ideal venue for live music festivals: nice weather, an international airport and great variety of accomodation. If you have the time and money, come to Primavera Sound [Spring Sound] from May 30 to June 3, you will already be able to take a bath in the Mediterranean... If you are into electronic music, come to Sonar 2012 about ten days later...

The Ramon Llull literary prize 2012

The original news story in Catalan was written by Lluís Llort and published in El Punt Avui here. The following is an unauthorized translation: 

"An accelerated Llull"

Last evening, at the Palau de la Generalitat [seat of the regional Catalan government] and chaired by President Mas, took place the ceremony of the 32nd Ramon Llull literary prize, the highest doted (90,000 euros) one for a Catalan book, organized by the Catalan government and the Planeta publishing house, which will publish the winning novel. This year's winner is Imma Monsó (Lleida, 1958) with the novel "The Fast Woman", which she presented in the competition as "We will be brief" and under the pseudonym of Alice Nes; it was chosen from 58 original manuscripts that participated this year.

Vincent Villatoro, president of the Institut Ramon Llull [cultural institution modeled after the British Council or the Cervantes Institute], before presenting the winner had some words of remembrance for the recently deceased Carlos Pujol, writer, critic and jury member for 31 years. The members of this year's jury were Sam Abrams, Laura Borras, Leonello Brandolino, Teresa Colom, Pere Gimferrer, Gemma Lienas and Emili Rosales.

The first thing Imma Monsó did was to formally thank for the award and stress that it made her feel "very happy", though her facial expression never corroborated this. She then read a few lines of the novel and explained it with a well-structured speech, delivered maybe a little too fast due to her nervousness or to the influence of her novel's main character: "The fast woman is rooted in the wind, so it is like saying she's uprooted."

The main character is a psychiatrist, childless and with a sick father. "She does not have a free minute, which is her main goal in life. She does everything at a rapid pace, perhaps determined by neurological factors, and in fact the her life's motto is "the quicker the better", applied to the buying of bread, cutting of her hair or opening a drawer, "said Monsó.

As in nearly all of her works, including "Like a holiday", "A veritable character" and "A man of his word", the family has a lot of weight: "The novel is a privileged area to talk about families. It is a work about family conflicts, especially between the protagonist, her father and her brother." The protagonist is a woman who runs a lot, always fast, "as any person today living in an urban environment."

It is a vindication of the slow, perhaps in the way of Kundera, "a metaphor of the times we live in, dominated by the immediacy, which is the source of the hardships we suffer, from the ethical to the economical; is the supremacy of time over space, you cannot fit into a mold that is constantly changing, ..." she said, adding: "We are forced to live under the speed's dictatorship, everything must be in real time, as they call it. "The work includes other issues, too: "There is a generally little-treated relationship, that between father and daughter; there is also a house in a provincial town in which have lived three generations; I talked about doctors' manias, because I like that topic, and about the thirst for art. I also wanted to make a tribute to friendship and dedicate a part to personal crises, such as the depression suffered by the protagonist, in active form, of course."
The work is structured in chapters that alternate between first person and present tense, and third person  and the past, between speed and reflection. "I made a great effort not to cut too much, as I normally do; thus, this is my thickest book. I am satisfied, but not entirely; who ends a novel and remains totally satisfied is either stupid or naive." She had also some autocriticism: "Maybe they will say that my characters are peculiar... It is true that often I put them on the edge of neurosis. This time I have been more meticulous with the creation of the characters." The distressing rhythm of some parts of the work and the protagonist has a harmful element: "From the very beginning or towards the end, but I always end up being the character, and with this novel I ended up very badly ...".
Monsó confessed why she took part in the competition: "Because I have been translated into several languages, but never into French, and the fact that the prize includes this translation makes me excited." And she ended by vindicating the fact of reading, doing it "fully and trying to generate a literature that seeks to create readers, and not to count them."

 
As far as this blogger could find out, none of Monsó's novels have been translated into English. Here you can read a short biography in English and see her bibliography on the pages of the Catalan Writers' Association. There is also an informative Wikipedia entry here.

Today in History: 300th anniversary Frederik II "the Great"

The Wikipedia has an exhaustive article here. If you read German you will find a host of news articles on hin on zeit.de, spiegel.de, etc. these days.

Catalan authors: Quim Monzó

Quim Monzó (Barcelona, 1952) is probably the most international of Catalan authors and one of the most widely read contemporaneans. His works have been translated to a host of other languages. He has a very informative homepage, here, where you also find the references to the English versions of some of his books, and what is more, some links to articles, etc. of his published in English. Amazon.com lists three books of his available in English.
Several times a week he writes columns in the op-ed section of La Vanguardia, the most prestigious of Catalan dailies (though it started out as a Spanish newspaper more than 125 years ago, and only in 2011 adopted a Catalan version). He comments on daily life, political events, or articles he read in foreign-language journals not in reach of most of his readers. The Wikipedia article dedicated to Monzó has all the relevant biographical information and links to some shorter prose of his, here.