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The current boom in rural-themed literature in Spain has been interpreted as a response to certain social and commercial needs that acquire a contradictory ideological value (Ibarretxe Diego and Delgado [2022]. "Comunidades inimaginables: narrativas sobre la España vaciada." In España comparada: literatura, lengua y política en la cultura contemporánea, coordinated by Christian Claesson. Granada: Editorial Comares, 104–108). In contrast to the fictions that perpetuate an idealized or uncritical imaginary of the rural world, a body of new works has emerged that develop an attentive gaze at living beings. In the Catalan context, this local and intimate approach to the daily life of rurality has allowed certain writers to promote an ecoresponsible sensibility, which is grounded in a sensitive relationship with the natural world. Based on these premises, the aim of this article is to analyze a selection of stories from the books El sifon de can Sitra (2017), Les cuques (2020) and Les hores noves (2022), by Julià Guillamon, which focus on different elements of the living world. The analysis is based on the idea that the author's local attachment allows him to develop a sensitive and resonant view of the living beings that are part of a very specific environment: the town of Arbúcies and Montseny Natural Park, located in the center of Catalonia. Starting from the idea of "sensitive relationships", developed by Estelle Zhong Mengual and Baptiste Morizot (2018), and the concept of "resonance", defined by Hartmut Rosa (2020), this article will explore the way in which Guillamon develops rural themes that include not just living beings, but agriculture and forestry as well. In his books, the author uses resources from treatises on natural sciences, literary journalism and nature diaries. This use of nonfiction literature allows him to build a demystified and realistic vision of the Montseny massif (a space with a significant cultural weight in the Catalan literary tradition), through which it is possible to reconstitute a sensitivity towards natural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the dominant ideologies of the different representations of the countryside in modern and contemporary Catalan literature. I propose three main tendencies or stages. First, in the nineteenth century the countryside provided a symbolic form to local fatherlands that portrayed the mythification of the native soil, the transmission of historical memory and an implicit defense against the penetration of the Spanish state. Second, in the twentieth century the countryside became part of the political process of spatializing the Catalan nation. Josep Pla's oeuvre constitutes the most comprehensive effort to narrate the national genius loci. Finally, literary works in the twenty-first century have focused on representing the ways in which globalization has altered the Catalan countryside. In our present, the geography of the rural has been largely disjointed by suburbanization, tourism, overexploitation of natural resources, itinerant immigration, remote work and political clientelism, but also multiple instances of local resistance and alternative forms of life. As AMO/Rem Koolhaas argue in Countryside: A Report, the rural world is currently more volatile than the most accelerated city, and many of the tensions between the global and the local, capital and labor, and human and natural histories emerge there in more extreme ways than in any urban space. In this global context, one singular novel, Irene Solà's Canto jo i la muntanya balla (2019), thematizes how even the geological sphere of the countryside has become an unstable space of postsubjective experience and magmatic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Impossibilia: Revista Internacional de Estudios Literarios is the property of Impossibilia: Revista Internacional de Estudios Literarios and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents the results of a study focusing on the reception of a fictional story by Kurt Vonnegut translated from English into Catalan and Dutch in three conditions: machine translated, post-edited, and human translated. Participants (n = 223) rated the three conditions using three scales: narrative engagement, enjoyment, and translation reception. The results show that human translation had higher engagement, enjoyment, and translation reception in Catalan, compared to the post-edited and machine-translated translations. However, Dutch readers scored the post-edited translation higher than the human and machine translation, and the highest engagement and enjoyment scores were reported for the original English version. We hypothesize that when reading a fictional story in translation, not only are the condition and the quality of the translation key to understanding its reception, but also the participants' reading patterns, reading language, and, potentially, the status of the source language in their own societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975) Catalan literature suffered a terrible blow, mainly in the censorship of books published in Catalan. In this period of cultural repression, the objectives and characteristics of the mission of translating foreign poetry in the Catalan-speaking regions were determined by special socio-historical circumstances. This article presents a panoramic investigation into the dissemination of Chinese poetry in Catalan culture during the Franco dictatorship. The various aspects of the investigation and the period in which it was carried out have been studied: the publications, translation and editing, the motives of Catalan translators in carrying out their work and the influence of socio-historical elements on the dissemination of the translated poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Vilaseca's autobiographical work, published in 2017 and adapted for the stage in 2022, problematizes the binary divisions between truth and fiction, success and failure, as well as some iterations within de dynamics between shame and pride. Through the analysis of some pertinent moments in Vilaseca's work, this essay addresses several prevalent debates within Queer Studies in the last years, such as the explorations of the tensions around the notion of "shame" or the critical evaluation of the antisocial turn as well as the utopian vision within non-normative epistemologies. Furthermore, these pages aim to serve as a tribute of David Vilaseca, pioneer figure in the introduction of Queer Theories in Iberian (and Catalan) studies, and author of a monumental literary work that moves amidst the crevices of autobiography and fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Quaderns: Revista de Traducció is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on Valery Larbaud's role as a cultural mediator in promoting Catalan literature during the interwar period. Topics include his relationships with key Catalan intellectuals, his influence through literary journals, and his significant role in translating and disseminating European and Catalan works, particularly through the translation of Ce vice impuni.

The paper investigates a Slavic fragment from a chain of "relay" translations of one of the most popular religious books of early modern Europe, i.e., the anonymous Catalan allegory Spill de la vida religiosa (1515), which was translated into Polish by Kasper Wilkowski (1589) and gained significant popularity leading to further renditions – into Ruthenian prosta mova ('simple speech') and then into Church Slavonic. I argue that the Polish translation was based not only on a Latin 1583 edition of the book (as the existing scholarship suggests), but also on the manuscript version of an Italian translation, close to the Catalan original. Kasjan Sakowicz, who republished Wilkowski's work in 1625, in his preface informs about its existing translations into prosta mova and about the book's popularity in Kyiv. The archdeacon Theophan, who translated Wilkowski's work into Church Slavonic in 1688, in the Chudov Monastery in Moscow, had been educated in Kyiv. His translation was eventually printed in St. Petersburg in 1785. The paper analyzes different culture identities that Spill de la vida religiosa gains in its subsequent Slavic translations, and emphasizes the fact that they restore its contemplative and mystical dimension as well as its primary designation for the monastic readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The canons of current national literatures are influenced by new perspectives introduced by the changes taking place in a new transnational world order. The experience of migration in Catalonia implies significant changes in identity, a topic that leads to reflection on the literary identity of a land, the nationality of authors, and gender issues. The aim of this article is to provide a brief outline of the themes in Najat El Hachmi's works (Nador, Morocco, 1979), underlining the identity problem that affects second-generation migrants to Spain alongside the ongoing struggle for gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Scripta is the property of Scripta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Scripta is the property of Scripta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyzes two Catalan novels, Albert Sánchez Piñol's Victus: Barcelona 1714 (2012) and Martí Domínguez's L'esperit del temps (2019), in light of the concept of immunity developed by the Italian theorist Roberto Esposito. It is argued that the two works share an affinity by demonstrating the material relevance of Esposito's concepts, especially with reference to the skin as the basis for biopolitics. Victus links the rending of skin to textuality but simultaneously uses the breaking open of the body to highlight community as an assemblage of diverse material actors and agents. L'esperit del temps situates Nazi thanatopolitics at the intersection of biology and law, emphasizing how a politics of death relies on what kinds of matter, such as the phenotype of skin, are fetishized, pathologized, and subjected to human-centered techniques of power. Domínguez returns to the Second World War to comment on more contemporary concerns regarding bioethics and the increasingly mainstream presence of extremist politics in Europe. Opening the discussion with the reflections on skin of Donna Haraway and Jean-Luc Nancy, the article closes by engaging with Haraway's work on companionship and the "illicit fusion" of beings, particularly in the historical period referred to as the "Chthulucene," in which kinship and multispecies assemblages are viewed as tools for survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce one-parameter generalization of dual-hyperbolic Jacobsthal numbers – dual-hyperbolic r-Jacobsthal numbers. We present some properties of them, among others the Binet formula, Catalan, Cassini, and d'Ocagne identities. Moreover, we give the generating function and summation formula for these numbers. The presented results are a generalization of the results for the dual-hyperbolic Jacobsthal numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the role of translation in Iberian literary modernity not as a question of importation of foreign models from Europe but rather as a question of the circulation of texts and cultural traditions within Iberia. It focuses on translation projects that originated within and among Iberian cultures in the nineteenth century, and that projected themselves outward. This study proposes a genealogy that links the revival and spread of floral games in Catalonia and across Spain beginning in the 1850s to translation practices in the Peninsula in the early twentieth century. After an analysis of the relationship between the spread of the floral games and the perception of their decadence in Catalan literary historiography, the article proposes an alternate understanding of the phenomenon that links the floral tradition to translingual cultural projects. Particular attention is paid to the 'polyglot edition' of Catalan poet Joaquim Rubió i Ors' Lo Gayter del Llobregat ('The piper of the Llobregat River') (1888–1902). This publication, like the floral tradition that proliferated alongside it, reflects an effort to create a multilingual literary sphere anchored in the Iberian Peninsula that Spanish and Catalan literary histories have overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Scripta is the property of Scripta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article sets out to examine the figure, work and literary and political significance of Joan Fuster on the centennial of his birth and 30 years after his death. Joan Fuster, the most important essayist in Catalan in the twentieth century, cut from the same cloth as Eugeni d’Ors and Josep Pla, is a polyhedric personality with many faces: man of letters, civil intellectual, poet, scholar, literary critic, historian of literature and culture, translator, editor, newspaper columnist, thinker, civic referent, cultural and political activist, father of the Catalan Lands… This article makes a brief survey of his literary and public career as a writer, from the biographical and historical circumstances of his entrée into Catalan literature and culture to the continued relevance of his literary output and political proposals.

The aim of this paper is to carefully analyse the rewriting process that Maria Aurèlia Capmany did of her short novel Traduït de l’americà (1960, written 1959) to transform it into the novel Ves-te’n ianqui o, si voleu, traduït de l’americà (1980, written 1979). There is, therefore, a process of «lengthening», of the original text that doubles its length. Based on the studies of French genetic textual criticism or the Italian variants and, above all, the contributions of general studies on intertextuality and Gérard Genette’s studies on hypertextuality, this paper shows the resources that have allowed a change of subgenre (from the short story to the novel), the modification of the narration (the changes in the typology of the autodiegetic narrator) and the modification of the text (the structure, with the segmentation into even and odd chapters) as well as the innovations in the story (appearance of new characters and new motives). The conclusions take stock of the consequences of such remodeling.

This work compares the articles published by Quim Monzó in the early 1980s in the newspaper Avui and its versions published in the collection El dia del senyor (The Day of the Lord) of 1984. The transition from the periodical press to the volume of articles entails a rewriting process that ranges from correcting spelling errors to excision or massive adhesion of text. Monzó, who admits to being obsessed with the revisionist process, changes the titles of certain articles, eliminates unnecessary inserts and superfluous words, integrates formulas to make the texts clearer and more understandable and, even, includes new information to clarify previously expressed ideas. In this respect, it is worth noting the footnotes, which he introduces in two of the articles of the collection under the pretext of responding to a reader’s suggestions, and which allow him to rectify and include new content without remaking or contradicting the original text.

This article examines the representation of Catalan identity in Ventura Pons's 2007 film Barcelona (un mapa). The discussion breaks down the daring, anti-objectivistic ways in which Pons revisits early Francoism in order to denounce the regime's essentialist rhetoric and counter its lasting imprint on the city of Barcelona. Special emphasis is devoted to the film's complex portrayal of those members of the Catalan bourgeoisie who supported Franco, a portrayal that foregrounds secrecy and the practice of cross-dressing as a fitting sociopolitical metaphor. First, the adoption of an anthropological perspective illuminates the dynamics of the massive religious events that allowed individuals to affect their adhesion to the Francoist state in public. Secondly, a Derridean examination of the act of cultural transmission in the film suggests that Pons invites spectators to experience the violence inherent in Catalan heritage in order to overcome its despotic hold on contemporary politics and culture. The conclusion argues that Barcelona (un mapa) centers often neglected processes of construction and performance of identity and opposes the notion that constructed identities need be "false." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My amada and I arrived in Barcelona from Paris. We saw from the start the two cities have much in common. Both went through architectural reorganization in the latter nineteenth [...]

Copyright of Estudis Romànics is the property of Institut d'Estudis Catalans and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diablotexto Digital is the property of Diablotexto Digital and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Lengua y Literatura Catalana, Gallega y Vasca is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The international projection of Catalan culture is one of the institutional missions of Catalonia since the recovery of democracy. The intensification of activities to promote culture as a distinctive feature of Catalan identity began at the end of the 80s. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, some specific events, such as the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007 or the nomination of Barcelona as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2015, reaffirm and strengthen the work carried out by institutions that work strictly on an international level, such as the Ramon Llull Institute, or to a different extent the Generalitat de Catalunya or the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona. In the present article, we review the main events related to the international projection of Catalan literature during the 21st century, in order to understand how these political and administrative actions have become a key factor in making Catalan culture visible as an identity in the global arena.

This article proposes a reading of La salvatge. Elegia de Dolores Mendoza (1994), by Isabel-Clara Simó, following two key concepts of the novel: on the one hand, that of savagery, understood as a representational exile that relegates the female characters of the story to the margins of discourse, both literally and figuratively. On the other hand, that of domestication, or imposition of the masculine order through the use of control, surveillance, and the logic of exchange. The study develops these two topics from the analysis of the characters but also in light of some of the most outstanding poetic and narratological resources of the novel, all under the theoretical frame of authors such as Maria-Mercè Marçal, Montserrat Roig and Judith Butler.

This article examines the politics and erotics of Catalan nationalism in the 2004 novel Lluny de l'horitzó perfumat (Far from the Perfumed Horizon), written in Catalan by the Palestinian-Catalan writer Salah Jamal and set in Barcelona during the Transition to Democracy. The article argues that the narrator's ability to "pass"—across ethnoracial, religious, linguistic, socioeconomic, and political lines—is not only an individual's tactic for securing social mobility, but also a gauge of shifting national narratives in the Transition. The article shows how socioeconomic class played into racial constructs that, in turn, supported the nationalist reimagining of Catalonia as a space apart during the Transition. By way of conclusion, the article proposes one of the novel's many satirical monikers, "Moroland," as a keyword for conceptualizing Catalonia as a transnational space of passing. "Moroland" offers a theory for rethinking Transition-era Catalonia in terms of the instability and performativity of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mercè Rodoreda is the most translated author in Catalan literature. La Plaça del Diamant, which has been translated into 37 languages in dozens of different translations, places her ahead of such internationally famous fiction writers as Jaume Cabré and Albert Sánchez Piñol. This symbolic novel of the human condition, hailed by critics and beloved by a diverse array of readers, is particularly representative of the author’s literary talent and ambition and can be considered a major 20th-century classic thanks to its extraordinarily high quality.

The article studies the presence of a feeling for language understood as an affective relationship to it in fictional works of writing of the self: Els ullastres de Manhattan by Ponç Pons and Temps d'innocència by Carme Riera as well as in Les darreres paraules. The cohabitation between the different languages that inhabit them, especially Castilian and Catalan, is questioned, and the question of self-translation in Carme Riera is also touched upon.

Copyright of Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the interplay between homosexual desire and anxiety in the poetry of Blai Bonet, one of the most important, complex, and problematic figures in modern Catalan literature. Bonet is usually presented as a homosexual author, but the way his poetry articulates same-sex desire is far from straightforward. Critics have highlighted the sensuality and eroticism of his poetry, as well as the importance of mysticism and Catholic imagery. However, a specific analysis of homosexual desire in Bonet's poetry has never been undertaken. Through a psychoanalytically-oriented reading of various poems by Bonet, this essay traces the movement and the effect of anxiety in a textual corpus characterised by a tension between a body mortified by pain, illness, and guilt, and an ecstatic body that seeks satisfaction in the social underworld, in voyeurism and fantasy, and in textual play. Blai Bonet's literary project promotes a textual revolution through the dissolution of genres and the proliferation of voices: he defines himself as "a poet without intimacy" whose work performs a radical dispersal of the subject, yet paradoxically his own name is constantly enunciated in the poems, while his body remains silent, concealed behind ellipses or in elusive references to (gay) sex. This article argues that following the trace of anxiety in Bonet's poetry allows us to move towards the locus where he confronts the complexities of his desire: through an act of sublimation that restates the sexual in creative life, Bonet turns anxiety into comedy, guilt into a sense of humour, and textual experimentation into a form of ascesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The metaphor about the love and the sea is a motif that has a long textual tradition. In his works, Llull uses various figures of speech at the service of his apologetic aims. An example is the nautical and commercial terminology that is regularly used to express Llull's thought. This is stated throughout his great work, the Llibre de Contemplació, in which the marine motif appears repeatedly with a clear moral and epistemological purpose. Specifically, in the LC we find the simile in various forms with a remarkable specific purpose. To show this specificity the similar will be compared to the marine metaphor that appears in the Llibre d'amic e amat, closer to the literary tradition, within the mechanics of the knowledge of mystical love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we compare the contemporary legend known as «revenge rape» with the literary versions present in several works of Catalan literature, such as the famous novel Estudi en lila by Maria-Antònia Oliver, and the short narrative that is at its origin, «Fils trencats»; the play Anna, o la venjança by Manuel Crespo Serrat, the short novel by Inés Vidal Farré El metge i un gos d'atura, and the story «Bèsties carnivores» by Carlota Gurt. We also mention some other cultural reflections of this urban legend, such as the Greek mythology, the rape and revenge films, and some specific contemporary films. Finally, the matching key points are extracted and a common pattern is formed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudis Romànics is the property of Institut d'Estudis Catalans and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Quaderns: Revista de Traducció is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Lengua y Literatura Catalana, Gallega y Vasca is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Lengua y Literatura Catalana, Gallega y Vasca is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During the second half of the 20th century, Jordi Sarsanedas was a relevant actor in the bilateral relationship between Catalonia and France. His engagement as a cultural activist led him to occupy strategic positions to disseminate the Catalan language and literature. Suffice to say that he was Serra d’Or editor-in-chief, dean of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, president of the Ateneu Barcelonès and president of the PEN Català. His knowledge of English and Italian, along with his prolonged stays in Glasgow and Milano, served him to become a literary ambassador. The cultural background that influenced him the most, however, was French, as it can be seen in his literary works — in prose and poetry — as well in his translations.

The article examines the opinion of the literary critic Ramon D. Perés about the arrival of literary and artistic modernity in Catalonia at the end of the 19th century. Perés notes that everything that came from Europe first passed through France, where not only texts but also translations were produced. However, opposed to the most innovative schools and fashions, the critic distanced himself from the most radical poetic renewal and ended up on the fringes of the movement that he himself had helped to develop.

Albert Savine was a key figure in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century for the relations of Catalan writers in France. Through his different facets as critic, translator and editor, which he exercised throughout his life, he made Catalan literature known in France, and his activity, considered as a whole, is an important example of cultural transfer. The article reviews the figure of Albert Savine as a critic, translator and editor of Catalan literature. Finally, the reception of the study on the revival of Catalan poetry, published by Savine in the preface of his French prose translation of Jacint Verdaguer’s L'Atlàntida (1884), is analysed.

The article introduces the most important Czech Catalanist, who has been introducing Catalan literature to Czech audiences for nearly half of a century. The case of Jan Schejbal confirms that the role of the translator cannot be reduced to transferring text from one language to another: they must actively participate in the literary exchange, often being the key figure. The personal contribution of the translator seems to be even more indispensable when literary enrichment between minor and/or medium cultures is concerned. In this sense, the work Schejbal did within the publishing house Odeon during the 1970s and 1980s was absolutely essential, as he was the only one who translated from this Romance language whose literature was practically unknown in what was then Czechoslovakia. However, this privileged position in forming Czech notions about Catalan literature ended with the downfall of Odeon, which occurred shortly after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. Despite the initial adversity he faced from the new commercial publishing houses, Jan Schejbal remained faithful to his longstanding ambition and continued to spread quality literature written in Catalan. Thanks to Prague’s lectorat de catala, founded in 1991, nowaday known as the Centre Carlemany de Llengua Catalana, a new field of action opened for him: he has been introducing students of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague to the culture and literature of the Catalan-speaking countries and, within a translation workshop, trains his successors. Also Schejbal’s life-long work on the very first Catalan-Czech and Czech-Catalan academic dictionary, about to be published, deserves special mention. This feat, among others, confirms again that the translator’s activity is more transcendental than it might seem. With the dictionary, Schejbal not only contributes significantly to the quality of future translations but also enables the reception of Catalan literature without the necessity of indirect translations via Spanish.