Two lawyers in love with Simenon revive his work in Catalan

BarcelonaCommissioner Jules Maigret's eyes "smile" as he has breakfast, accompanied by his wife, because life is "pleasant". They are both at the house in Meung-sur-Loire that they have been fixing up for years for the day Maigret has to retire. The 55-year-old man has two years and a few months left before leaving the police force, and this is perhaps the only regret he feels amidst the summer calm and the promise of lobster with mayonnaise for lunch. This is how "Maigret's Patience, novel by Georges Simenon (Liège, 1903 - Lausanne, 1989) which has just ceased to be unpublished in Catalan thanks to the small and exquisite Barcelona publishing house Días Contados, launched in 2009 by lawyer Ramon Girbau.

A Maigret's patience, the commissioner tries to unravel a series of jewel thefts that have taken place in Paris over twenty years. First published in French in 1965, it is one of the last novels the Belgian author dedicated to his most famous character. "A colleague, Sergio Sánchez Solé, who has read everything by Simenon, had been recommending for a long time that I get into it – comments Girbau–. When I finally took his advice, I not only admitted that he is a magnificent author, but I also thought that we could translate it, and I proposed doing it together.". That's how they investigated which of Maigret's 75 novels were still untranslated into Catalan, and they chose Maigret's patience to inaugurate the project, which will include a total of five of the commissioner's cases. "We will publish a Simenon every year, but we will only translate two of them, the novel we have already published and Maigret defends himself [1964] –advances–. We will also have new translations by Núria Petit and Imma Falcó, who have already collaborated with the publishing house before.

Time does not take its toll on Maigret

In the Días Contados catalogue, there coexist the Tales of Kolyma of Varlam Shalamov with the poems of Francis Ponge and Les Murray, the essay Artificial paradises of Charles Baudelaireand diaries by Pierre Bergounioux, Paul Léautaud, and Julien Green. "We have touched on the crime genre before, with authors like Laura Mancinelli and Seicho Matsumoto, and we have two more books in the pipeline by Qiu Xiaolong, but Simenon's case is different, because we will do five books from an immense output," recalls Girbau. In addition to the 75 novels starring Maigret, the Belgian writer published 150 more works, apart from the more than one hundred he released at the start of his career under about twenty pseudonyms. "Maigret's novels might be for immediate consumption, but time has not taken its toll on them – comments the editor and translator. They are brief works, built with simple sentences and full of very visual dialogues: they are designed in such a way that the reader cannot put them down until they reach the end."

More than 550 million copies of Simenon's work have been sold. It can be read in almost fifty languages, and the number of translations exceeds 3,500. "Both in Catalan and Spanish there have been several attempts to publish him, but they have not had the same impact as in countries like Italy, where Adelphi has managed to sell Simenon fantastically," comments Girbau. Before Días Contados took it on, "Emili Manzano had translated for Navona, in 2022, Maigret's holidays (1948) and Maigret and the Dead Young Lady (1954). Five more books were to be published, but the project was interrupted. A decade earlier, Jaume Vallcorba set out to publish Simenon "with the decorum of great writers" from Quaderns Crema and Acantilado. In Catalan, only three novels were published between 2012 and 2014, one by Maigret, The yellow dog (1931), and two that do not belong to the cycle, cataloged as Roman numerals: The cat (1967) and The snow was dirty (1948). At Quaderns Crema, Simenon did not have as much luck as other emblematic recoveries of the publishing house, among which are those of Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka and Dorothy Parker. "Simenon's case is similar to that of Stefan Zweig, Honoré de Balzac, the Tirant lo Blanc and Don Quixote –commented the editor in 2012–: sometimes what is reduced is not the scope of the work, but the reading capacity of some critics".

There have been more previous attempts to publish Simenon in Catalan, including the dozen novels he published between 1964 and 1970La Cua de Palla, emblematic collection of crime fiction from Edicions 62. Translators such as Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Carme Vilaginés, and Ramon Folch i Camarasa. But the first Simenon to be translated into Catalan was by Gabriel Bas, for this same collection in 1964, and the chosen novel was The skin of a man (1931), a Maigret case.

The pioneering editorial project in Spain related to the Belgian author dates back to the 1940s, and was the idea of the Catalan writer Ferran Canyameres (Terrassa, 1898-1964) while he was in exile in France. From there, Canyameres contacted Simenon, who accepted the conditions of the offer: the twenty or so contracted novels were to appear in the Albor publishing house in the 1940s, owned by Canyameres, but finally – after many delays – they began to be published Aymà, although only in Spanish.