The writer who had to translate thirty pages a day to survive

Barcelona"Like a happy shipwrecked man, / in October '26, / on the thirtieth, Ramon arrives in the world, / in Barcelona. / Without making much fuss. He is the ninth child." This is how the ballad dedicated by Joan Vilamala to Ramon Folch i Camarasa (1926-2019) begins, one of the key authors of the literary revival in Catalan that started in the late 1950s, alongside Manuel de Pedrolo, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, and Josep Maria Espinàs.

The second to last of Josep M. Folch i Torres's (1880-1950) ten children, Ramon lived in "an atmosphere of intellectual prosperity", as essayist and professor Montserrat Bacardí recalls, until the end of the Civil War, during which Catalan became a persecuted language. Folch i Camarasa's aspiration, from a very young age, was to "try to recompose" that pre-Francoist environment "through various initiatives", Bacardí continues, before mentioning the three pillars of his work: theatre, narrative, and translation. "In all three fields, he proceeded with a fluency and agility that recalls the mastery of his predecessor", adds the philologist.

(1880-1950), Ramon lived in "a climate of intellectual prosperity", as recalled by the essayist and professor L'ofici de viure la paraula" (The craft of living words), the reissue of the novel "L'estiu més bonic

" (The most beautiful summer) (1966), and the publication of the correspondence between the writer and one of his editors, Joan Sales.

From the imposed language to the cherished language

Like other colleagues of his generation, Ramon Folch i Camarasa had to make his way first in Spanish. During the 1950s, he worked as a proofreader and translator for the Janés publishing house, owned by his friend Josep Janés i Olivé (1913-1959). "He never wanted to take responsibility by signing these translations with his name simply because he had to rewrite the books in an imposed language," comments Bacardí. In parallel, Folch i Camarasa began to make his own work known. 1954 was the year of his triple debut: the play Un vailet entre dos reis, the poetry collection L'aigua negra, and the novel Camins de ciutat.

Also in 1954, Folch i Camarasa married Montserrat Pons i Dedeu. They had six children. They grew up while their father continued translating at an ever-increasing pace. In 1959, having already won the Joanot Martorell prize with La maroma (1956), he published the first translation into Catalan, The Diary of Anne Frank, with Selecta. "Until the beginning of the 1960s, translations into Catalan had been persecuted by Francoist censorship with a very particular obsession," recalls Montserrat Bacardí. The relaxation of the dictatorship allowed publishers like Aymà, Selecta, Edicions 62, and Club Editor to consolidate. We owe Ramon Folch i Camarasa the Catalan versions of such significant novels that broadened the readership, such as Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (Plaza & Janés, 1963); The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, by Georges Simenon (Edicions 62, 1964); The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler (Edicions 62, 1966), and The Great Gatsby, by Francis Scott Fitzgerald (Edicions 62, 1967).

"During these years he carried out intense activity because he lived by translation – Bacardí continues–. His pace was, by his own confession, thirty pages a day, in an early attempt to turn the task into a profession. Thus, for example, in 1965 he published twenty-one translations and in 1966, eighteen." In the 1970s, the pace of translations decreased: between 1973 and 1986, living in Geneva, he worked as a professional translator, from English and French into Spanish, at the World Health Organization.

Young people full of life thrown into failure

In the seventh volume of Història de la literatura catalana –a project still in progress–, Margarida Casacuberta frames the literary production of Ramon Folch i Camarasa under the heading of Catholic novel, which is born "from a confluence of religious and literary interests in accordance with a conception of the literary fact as inseparable from morality" and which, according to the philologist, includes names such as Joan Sales, Xavier Benguerel and Blai Bonet. Beyond faith, the characters in the novels of these authors construct "a stark vision of reality" through "idealists with feet of clay, young people full of life destined for existential failure and dragged down by the ruins of the world they seemed destined to conquer".

In addition to winning awards such as the Sant Jordi for La visita (1964) and the Ramon Llull for Sala de miralls (1982), among Folch i Camarasa's abundant production are El nàufrag feliç (Albertí, 1959) – which Viena re-edited with very good reception in 2022– and the scripts for the fifteen Massagran albums, illustrated by Josep Maria Madorell, published between 1981 and 2002 by Casals publishing house. They were one of the most resounding successes of comics in Catalan in the 80s – it sold over 100,000 copies. Even so, Folch i Camarasa, who continued publishing until 2006 – the last novel was Contra el silenci, at L'Albí–, complained with a sense of humor about the bad luck he always had when he sent an unpublished work to a literary award: "There is a conspiracy against me, every time I enter a prize there is some writer who decides to submit a much better work and, of course, they win. Many Catalan writers are better than me, but that doesn't mean they are good".