BarcelonaIt is difficult to understand that journalism and the media are so prone to optimism. Following Sant Jordi's day, it was proclaimed to the four winds - the media perhaps imbued with a patriotism that does not admit dialectics or criticism - that more books had been sold than ever (two million), that our country was the most cultured of the world, which had been shown that young people read a lot and even more excellences.
Let's leave aside the possibility that these two million books don't have two million readers: today, we see young and not-so-young people hooked on their phones at home and on the street. But, based on the books purchased, it can't be said that they contribute to a large culturalization of society: most of the books sold are the result of commercial strategies never based on the intrinsic category of a book; most also respond to passing fads of guaranteed success, and we have no evidence that good books of universal literature were sold by the thousands throughout Catalonia, including our own when it reached this level: how many editions have been sold in the last thirty years of Lluís Maria Todó's translation of Madame BovaryHow many of the big ones Tristram Shandy translated by the longed-for Joaquim MallafrèHow many copies were sold of one of the most enjoyable and good-humored books ever written, the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, by Dickens, in translation by Josep Carner and extraordinary, bilingual edition by Jaume Coll Llinàs? Did anyone think of purchasing the Iliad by Pau Sabaté, which is as great and meritorious as theOdyssey by Carles Riba? In how many establishments were foreign literature works from the last two hundred years published in Catalan by Flâneur or Edicions de 1984? These are pertinent questions.
This is what we still lack in Catalonia: accepting that if we, unfortunately, have glaring gaps in the centuries-old course of literary history, we must make the small effort to read, instead of circumstantial trifles, the works that have forged the great universal literature produced by nations that have had more power and more luck than ours. Then ours will become greater.
