Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) is regarded as the most distinguished twentieth-century Catalan writer. Although her work has been translated into English, like most Catalan literature it remains virtually unknown in Anglophone cultures. She received only three years of formal education, between 1915 and 1918, but she was always a voracious reader. After the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Rodoreda lived in exile between Paris, Bordeaux, Limoges and Geneva and, at first, supported herself by sewing. With little time for longer works, Rodoreda devoted her attention to the writing of short stories, a few of which were published in Republican journals abroad. Due to the trauma of war and exile, together with the dire consequences of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship for the Catalan language and culture, for twenty years none of her work appeared in her native country. Once settled in Geneva in the 1950s and under less straitened circumstances, she began writing the novels that would bring her great acclaim. Gabriel García Márquez referred to her 1962 novel La plaça del Diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves) as “the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War.” Her other novels include Camelia Street (1966), Garden Over the Sea (1967), Aloma (1969, a revised version of the novel was published in 1939), A Broken Mirror (1974), How Much, How Much War... (1980), and the posthumous Death and the Spring (1986). She published three collections of short stories: Twenty-Two Stories (1958), My Christina & Other Stories (1967), and It Seemed Like Silk (1978). Mercè Rodoreda returned to Catalunya in 1979, after the death of Franco. She took up residence in Romanyà, on the Costa Brava, where she lived until her death.

Continue>>>

A translator from Spanish and Catalan, Martha Tennent currently lives between Barcelona and New York. She was the founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic (Spain). Her publications include the edited volume Training for the New Millennium: Pedagogies for Translation and Interpreting (2005). Recently, her translations have appeared in TWO LINES and Words Without Borders.