Introduction to Mercè Rodoreda

Most of Rodoreda's novels and stories are written from a woman's point of view and reflect in general the lives of ordinary people. In "On the Train," which appeared in Twenty-Two Stories, we overhear one side of a conversation, that of an elderly woman returning to Barcelona after the Civil War. References are made to the burning of the convents in 1909, the Republic of 1931, and the Le Vernet concentration camp, where thousands of members of the Republican side were confined following their defeat in the civil war. The key problem in translating the story was finding a voice for this rural woman who is now a domestic servant. She is naïve yet motherly, seemingly unaware of her own tragic misfortunes. My solution was to cultivate a working-class dialect replete with colloquialisms. Some of the colloquialisms, such as the expression "poor as Job's turkey," are now outdated, intended to indicate in an approximate way the period of Rodoreda's story. At the same time, I have retained certain Catalan words that are intelligible in context but that signal that what is being read is precisely a translation.

–MT

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