Five international phenomena that we can now read in Catalan

BarcelonaIn the autumn of 2016, the editor Joan Carles Girbés decided to give himself a present. He wanted to buy a thick book, a "brick", and his eyes fell on the image Orgasmic man by Peter Hujar, who illustrates the cover of So little life by Hanya Yanagihara published in Spanish by Lumen. "I started the novel without knowing what it was about and it immediately captivated me. I had that extraordinary feeling of never wanting to finish it, of spending hours and hours immersed in a story without being aware of the passage of time," explains Girbés. When he read the last page, the first thing that came to his mind was that he should publish it in Catalan. But he had only been working on it for a couple of months. as editorial director of ARA Llibres And starting out in a new place with the translation of a novel of more than 800 pages was a risky project. Eight years later, the editor has been able to get rid of that thorn: So little life arrived in Catalan last Autumn under the Amsterdam label and translated by Alexandre Gombau.

Hanya Yanagihara's novel is a painful and overwhelming story about male friendship that has triumphed wherever it has gone. The path that the book has followed in Catalonia is similar to that of other titles that were published in Spanish years ago and that in recent months have been translated into Catalan. La Segunda Periferia has opted for Dreams of trains by Denis Johnson, which has been around since 2015 in Spanish with Random House. Periscope has just launched The life of the bookseller AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, published in 2014 in Spanish by AdN. And the Vienna publishing house released it in June 2023 A season to whistle by Ivan Doig, which was published in Spanish in 2016 by Libros del Asteroide. It has been available in bookstores since the same year. SPQR by Mary Beard with Crítica, but that did not stop the Columna publishing house from publishing it in Catalan last year. All of them are titles of great international success that have arrived in Catalan unexpectedly, when the world launches and the promotions of the authors had long since passed. And despite bursting onto the market at the wrong time, they have reaffirmed themselves as phenomena in our country.

"Some of us take the Catalan route: we buy the rights and treat the book as if it did not exist in Spanish, acting outside the reality of our sector, which is bilingual. Sometimes it turns out well and sometimes it doesn't," says the editor of La Segunda Periferia, Miquel Adam. He wanted to Dreams of trains in his catalogue, so he gave it a chance and published it last November with a translation by Ariadna Pous. The book was originally published in 2011 in the United States, but last year —when Adam already had the rights— The New York Times Adam included it in his list of the best novels written in the 21st century, which helped give it a new lease of life. "Johnson is a much-loved writer who connects with readers with stories that are not epic," says Adam. Dreams of trains It is about a man who built bridges for railroads in the early 20th century. His story is a tribute to anonymous people that highlights the importance of the train in shaping American culture.

Booksellers, a fundamental piece

Sometimes publishing a world-famous writer opens its doors to publishers to rescue previous works that had not reached our home. After checking Gabrielle Zevin's big hit with Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, Periscope has given a new life in Catalan to The life of the bookseller AJ Fikry (translated by Octavi Gil), a novel that appeared in the United States in 2014 and is a hymn to second chances and the love of reading. The role of booksellers is key in Zevin's fiction and also in the adventure of publishers to publish titles in Catalan that are not new. "They are books that booksellers know perfectly well because they have already been published in Spanish. One way of not having to spend a lot of promotional efforts in complicated times such as, at the doors of Sant Jordi, is to offer booksellers authors that they already know, from the start, that are very good," says Miquel Adam, who did a similar exercise with Girl, woman, others by Bernardine Evaristo (2024).

Beyond the commercial intention, behind these books is the publishers' willingness to make a substitution effort so that the literature they consider important and excellent is available in our language. "Molts of nosaltres vam créixer llegint en Català, but at a certain moment of the youth we only found the books that are of interest to us in Castilian. The intention is that the current generations do not know what they want, that they are trying to find the six biblioteques in Català", affirms the editor of Periscopi, Aniol Rafel, who refutes the idea that, if a title exists in Spanish, it is not available for translation into Catalan. "It's not about giving away ground or giving up on them. The market is small, complicated and precarious, but if we look at the numbers, in general, we can have a presence with these titles in Catalan," stresses Rafel, who gives as examples three other authors from his catalogue: Jeanette Winterson, José Eduardo Agualusa and David Foster Wall.

Books with the scent of a classic

"I feel very bad that a good book is not published in Catalan because it has already been published in Spanish. This makes us aspire to a mediocre culture, without pretensions, and it is not going anywhere," says the Vienna-based editor Isabel Monsó. Although the collection The Vienna Circle specializes in modern classics of the 20th century, in 2023 they decided to make an exception and add a book originally published in 2006: A season to whistle by Ivan Doig, who translated Marc Donat. "It's the most modern book we've published. I really liked it and it connects with the spirit of the collection. It had to be included," says Monsó about this tender and funny story of a family in rural America at the beginning of the 20th century.

The publisher explains that there are titles destined to become classics and that, therefore, translating them into Catalan makes perfect sense. They confirmed this with The traveling bookstore by Christopher Morley, of which they have made five editions despite the fact that it had been circulating in Spanish for some time. "They are longsellers, books that you read all the time with a smile and that give off an aroma of timeless classics. It is true that translating them is risky, but there is no need to be afraid, because they have an audience," says Monsó. It is the same thing that has happened with SPQR by British professor Mary Beard, translated by Joan Solé. "It is a real delight, an essential book on classical Rome with a double virtue: it does not disappoint experts and it interests non-specialist readers. Having it in the catalogue is a source of pride, because it will become a classic," says the editor of Columna, Marta Selvas.

How So little life, SPQR It is a long book (it has around 700 pages) and its publication involves high costs, both in translation and production. This is one of the reasons why these titles arrive months later in our language, when the publishers finally see the project clearly in economic terms. "The investment is large, but we cannot allow phenomena that are popular all over the world, whatever their genre, not to be available in Catalan," says Joan Carles Girbés. In the Amsterdam catalogue they translated The Summer Mom Had Green Eyes of Tatiana Tibuleac Five years after its publication in Spanish, the gamble paid off. These are great publishing ventures, but readers have shown that it is worth fighting against it if the books are good.