Xavier Grasset recommends the uncensored translation of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'

BarcelonaThe journalist Xavier Grasset, who currently presents La Selva on TV3, recommends The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (Dublin, 1854 - Paris, 1900). The novel's plot premise is brilliant and perverse at the same time: since Dorian Gray does not want to grow old, nor does he want to be disfigured by the mark of the experiences that living entails, he manages to preserve himself as he is – beautiful, young, and attractive – while his portrait becomes deformed and repainted with all the moral corruption and all the abjections that his soul accumulates.

Grasset particularly values the translation by Yannick Garcia, very faithful to the original, published by La Casa dels Clàssics within the Bernat Metge Universal collection. “It is the first time that the initial and uncensored version of the work has been published in Catalan, free from the cuts that removed the homoerotic references,” says Grasset. The translator offers a text with very careful language that is complemented, in addition, by a final note and the famous preface that the author wrote for the 1891 edition.

Another reason to read Wilde's work, Grasset assures, is the preface by Albert Serra. “He throws out a series of key ideas about the nature of art that are good to keep in mind,” reflects the journalist, without forgetting a key theme of Wilde's novel: the passage of time and death. “It portrays a very specific era that is not ours, but which maintains an eternal relevance. Today we continue to be immersed in this struggle over image, beauty, and the passage of time, which we would often wish would not advance so rapidly,” says Grasset.

Furthermore, the cultural agenda currently accompanies the famous novel by the Irish writer. “Although it is not a play, at the moment we can see an adaptation of it on stage at the Grec Festival, starring Àngels Gonyalons. We are faced with that classic dilemma – in the style of L'auca del senyor Esteve, which before being a play was a novel – of reinterpreting the work's format, something that helps us to place the text and look at it from another perspective,” states Grasset. “The novel connects directly with the myth of Faust: the temptation to stop time, to make a pact with the devil to not lose youth, and the big question of what we would be willing to do to contravene the natural cycle of one's own life,” he concludes.