What do I recommend you read this summer?
BarcelonaDo not trust, dear readers, the lists of books for the summer proposed by the newspapers, with the exception of this one: they are at the service of the publishers and the bookstores, places where - this can perfectly happen - one might not find any edition of the Treat, by Plato - a reading that teenagers would really enjoy - or by The Princess of Cleves —ideal for any lady who wants and endures adulterous summer love. Bookstores are full of classics; many publishers in the country publish magnificent translations of books written in foreign languages, more or less ancient, that could delight readers any time of year. But these books are rarely recommended.
See, for example, which newspapers could have been recommended to us, which you will find or can ask the bookseller for: Iliad, translated by Pau Sabaté; The Golden Ass, of Apuleius; Daphnis and Chloe, by Longus; the last Catullus edited in Adesiara; The Captain's Daughter, by Pushkin; Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; A room of one's own, by Virginia Woolf; Confessions of Felix Krull either Mario and the Magician, by Thomas Mann —the recent translation of Joseph and his brothers It's great news, but it is more of a book for winter eves, like Proust—; Songs, by Giacomo Leopardi; Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen; The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Crime and Punishment —always available—, by Dostoyevsky, whom Josep Pla called "degenerate"; The world of yesterday either Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman, by Stefan Zweig; any Tolstoy, of which there are many in our language; Nicholas Nickleby, by Dickens; The History, by Elsa Morante; Eugénie Grandet, by Balzac; Stories, by Robert Walser; In cold blood either Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote; Baumgartner, of Paul Auster; Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville; The process, by Kafka; The Tellier House, by Maupassant; The pearl, by John Steinbeck; The secret agent, by Joseph Conrad; I miss him, by Albert Camus; all the stories and tales by Chekhov that can be found; The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth; the Stories, by Faulkner; The red and the black either The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal; the formidable Pickwick of Dickens-Carner, and the largest collection from the Bernat Metge collection, the source of almost all Western literature and wisdom. There are thousands; they'll never be consumed. But almost none are seen at the stalls on Sant Jordi Day, and very few are widely covered in the press.
All of this, and much more, is in Catalan; and translations increasingly present a language of higher quality than many books "originally" written in Catalan. Still an effort, Catalans, if we want to be republican!
