Some of his translations are long out of print, and two of these books have been retranslated by Peter Bush. He translated Incerta glòria ( Uncertain Glory) by Joan Sales, La plaça del diamant ( The Time of the Doves), El carrer de les Camèlies ( Camellia Street) and La meva Cristina i altres contes ( My Cristina and Other Stories) by Mercè Rodoreda, Les histories naturals ( Natural History) by Joan Perucho, as well as poetry by Salvador Espriu, Joan Maragall, Maria-Mercè Marçal, and J. A poet, and a journalist, Rosenthal was a New Yorker who moved to Barcelona in the seventies, taught himself Spanish and Catalan, and fell in love with Catalan literature. Despite his premature death at age 46, he indelibly changed the world of English language translations from Catalan through a combination of good taste and publishing savvy. I deem David Rosenthal “legendary” because he was a true pioneer. My objective was to see what could potentially be of use in these archives to literary historians (as part of the ongoing story of how Catalan literature travels into English), and to translators, and to teachers of translation. I decided to have a look at the holdings of Rosenthal’s translation of Víctor Català’s Solitud, published by Readers International Editions in 1992. When I realized that the archive of the legendary translator David Rosenthal is held at the Biblioteca d’Humanitats at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, I became intrigued with the possibility of gaining insight into his decision-making process, of shedding light on how Rosenthal resolved what David Bellos has termed, “the unfathomable puzzle of how we make ourselves understood to others and to ourselves.”
In my current doctoral research, I am immensely grateful for the chance to “get to know” a deceased author through the course of reading fifty years of his correspondence, and as a result I’ve begun to be slightly more intentional about saving drafts, at least digitally. However, what are the trade-offs of our embrace of technology? At times I’ve felt guilty of tossing out the baby with the bath water, when overwriting drafts in such a way that I’d effectively erased my process. Despite the prevailing idea that translations age faster and more poorly than originals-part of the “fetishization of the perfect translation” as Tess Lewis aptly described it-I believe retranslation and respect for translation history need not be antagonistic.Īs 21 st-century translators, I think we can all agree on the advantages of the computer age in terms of ease of research and delivery.
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