Peter Bush and Amaia Gabantxo discuss Joan Sales’ “Uncertain Glory,” translated from Catalan by Bush.
Presented in partnership with the Joan Coromines Chair of Catalan Studies, the UChicago Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Institut Ramon Llull.
At the Co-op
About the book: Spain, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo—a beautiful widow with a shadowy past—puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís’s son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city’s morale, she leaves to spend the winter with Lluís’s brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on “dead” fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini’s decision will put her family’s fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, an old friend and a traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth, and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal, “Uncertain Glory” is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
About the translator: Peter Bush is an award-winning translator who lives in Oxford. Among his recent translations are Josep Pla’s “The Gray Notebook,” which won the 2014 Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, and Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Tyrant Banderas (both for NYRB Classics); Emili Teixidor’s “Black Bread,” Jorge Carrión’s “Bookshops,” and Prudenci Beltrana’s “Josafat.”
About the interlocutor: Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, a flamenco singer and literary translator specialized in Basque literature. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago, and performs regularly in venues all over the city. She is the most prolific translator of Basque literature to date, as well as a pioneer in the field, and has received multiple awards for her work; most recently, the OMI Writers Translation Lab award, a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship, and a year long artist-in-residence award at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. She has published and performed on both sides of the Atlantic: in Ireland and Great Britain, the countries in which she carried out her university education, and in the US, where she currently lives. Forthcoming (January 2018) with Archipelago Books in NY is “Twist,” her translation of Harkaitz Cano’s most recent novel.