Newsletter of the Translation Center | 2018 - Spring 2020
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TRANSLATION
ACTIVITY
Scholarly and educational activities featuring translation by members of the community of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the nearby colleges.
Sant Jordi: A Festival in Translation Saint Jerome may be the official patron saint of translators, but lately it is George, the patron saint of Catalonia, who has been inspiring new ways of celebrating translated literature. Each year the Catalan festival of Sant Jordi, or Saint George’s Day, which falls on April 23 and is widely known as the Day of the Book and the Rose, gives rise to events worldwide that can be located on a trilingual platform in Catalan, Spanish and English at #BooksandRoses. This year at UMass Amherst the annual Sant Jordi celebration took place as a virtual guest visit by esteemed translator Peter Bush to the Catalan Studies Facebook page. In his video lecture, Bush commented on new work in translation, in particular on a selection of texts from Barcelona Tales (Oxford University Press, 2019). He shared how the 6
stories he chose for the anthology show a city in transformation, and touched on choices a literary translator must make related to research, creative liberty, self-editing, and collaboration. Through this format, Bush’s talk reached over 700 visitors. A passage might be a place to walk, or a portion of literary text, or a means of moving toward transformation. In one of the texts from Bush’s anthology, Miquel Molina’s prezviously unpublished story “The Three Steps,” a young man makes a pilgrimage to meet an author during Barcelona’s Sant Jordi festival. As the narrator walks the length of the city, he must negotiate the wonderfully phrased “to-and-fro of books and roses.” The encounter leads to a rewriting of reality and expectation, culminating in, as many translators will surely appreciate, a punctilious typographical correction.
