Marcel Ortín

From Charles Lamb to Josep Carner: Translation and Rewriting of the Familiar Essay

In his time, Josep Carner was hailed as the prince of poets (“el príncep dels poetes”).1 At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry was the literary genre par excellence in the Catalan cultural system.2 Young writers thought that it could bring about a new vision of landscape and society, far from what they saw as the sentimentality and pessimism of their predecessors. By being prophetic and airy (“profètica i alada”), as Carner defined it, poetry could also offer an experimental field for the language.3 This was a crucial priority for a writer who thought that transforming the language would eventually result in social transformations. In his daily newspaper column “Glosari,” Eugeni d’Ors reformulated these ambitions into a theory, arbitrarisme (meaning the arbitrary imposition of form on reality), and their protagonists into a movement, Noucentisme (meaning the literature of the new century, as against the Romanticism of the past).4 Since then, these writers—above all Carner and his friend Jaume Bofill i Mates, whose pen namewas Guerau de Liost—have beenmostly regarded as Noucentisme poets. This does not do complete justice to Carner, because if it is true that he did not write much fiction—although he sometimes planned to do so—it is not any less true that he accumulated more than two thousand contributions to periodicals, a few of which were later collected in six volumes, and in 1924 the influential young journalists Josep Pla and Eugeni Xammar regarded him as “our best poet, our best prose writer and our best journalist.”5 Carner began to contribute to a newspaper in 1903, at the age of nineteen, when Enric Prat de la Riba recruited him for La Veu de Catalunya. Prat was then the leader of the first modern Catalan right-wing party, the Lliga Regionalista, and in 1914 would go on to become the first president of the Mancomunitat, the local autonomous administration. Carner agreed with Prat’s ideas, particularly with Catalanism and cultural modernization. This emerges quite clearly from the articles he published in the first fifteen years of his collaborationwith the newspaper. In some of these articles he resorts to overtly political arguments. Others, instead, present a marked literary character, as Carner comments on the attitudes of the Catalan people with the sense of observation and humorous devices typical of nineteenth-century journalism (the costumisme tradition), which he endows with a subtler use of language and more pointed aims. Modern English prose did not exert any influence on Carner until 1912 when, according to Carles Riba, he learned the language to read the lyric poets of both islands (“per llegir els lírics de les dues illes”).6 However, he read far more than the lyric poets. From 1917 to 1921 he fulfilled one of his most cherished projects: to run a publishing house aimed at providing his newspaper audience with good literature and, in particular, good translations. Through what became known as Editorial Catalana, he began to offer readers translated versions of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Arnold Bennett, and Mark Twain (later, he would translate R. L. Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, and Lewis Carroll).7 At this point, he thought it would be possible to earn a living by working for both the publishing house and the newspaper. But Prat’s death in 1917 and social