Beyond Sant Jordi

I'm taking advantage of Sant Jordi to pay tribute to the Catalan publishing houses that keep literature alive. It's they and their readers who raise the bar. If no one raises the bar, things will collapse, and the day these publishing houses fail—which isn't out of the question, given what's happened with education—little of us will remain. They are houses with reliable catalogs that remain outside the stacks of venal, award-winning, and promoted books that today fill the shelves of supermarkets and bookstores. These serious publishing houses would survive the disappearance of Sant Jordi—that much is out of the question—because they operate as far from big business as they do close to great books.

For example, Edicions de 1984, with its main collection, Mirmanda, which combines Catalan writers with international classics, or the collection The Classic, who last year published a new translation of War and Peace, wave Poetry, who has now published Dickinson's complete works.

For example, Edicions Enoanda, from Sabadell, is dedicated to philosophy, a discipline so neglected in Catalan, due to the lack of commitment of universities to our main cultural asset, which is the language.

For example, Adesiara Editorial, which provides us with the great classics of all time and puts us on the same level as the most powerful cultures.

For example, the historic Bernat Metge, with the new Bernat Universal Medical Collection, who now releases another translation of theOresteia, or the Barcino Publishing House, also renewed with the collections Looks and Essentials…

Or the one who has stolen my heart, the exquisite and coherent Flâneur, a rigorous reflection on the legacy of the 20th century, and who has just published a Japanese classic on the Hiroshima bomb that we were missing in Catalan, Black rain, and another Walser…

The way we have the country, all this wealth seems like a miracle. But it doesn't come from nowhere, let's be aware of that. I've left out many independent publishers that deserve to be here as much as the others, but I don't have space or prefer not to because of the ties—sometimes personal—that I have. I've left out Arcadia and I've left out Ela Geminada and Libros del Siglo, I've left out Fragmenta and I've left out the more well-known ones. They are the treasure chests of our cultural wealth, and this doesn't just mean the country of readers. It's a civilization. When the foam of the book festival subsides, I encourage readers to come and celebrate the catalogs of these impressive publishers, the Sant Jordi that truly slays the savage dragon.