A Turning Point in the Translation of Shakespeare into Catalan: The Case of Josep M. De Sagarra’s Macbeth

Vanessa Palomo Berjaga

doi:10.1515/mstap-2017-0017

Authors

Vanessa Palomo Berjaga

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2017-0017

Keywords:

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Josep Maria de Sagarra, Cebrià Montoliu, Diego Ruiz, Cèsar August Jordana, Catalan translations, linguistic analysis, performability

Abstract

Josep Maria de Sagarra translated twenty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays into Catalan in the early forties, at a time when Catalan language and culture were suffering severe repression due to Franco’s regime. The manuscript of Macbeth by Sagarra is from 1942; and the first edition (an impressive hard-bound clandestine edition) is from 1946 or 1947. Before his translation, there were three other Catalan translations of Macbeth, produced by Cebrià Montoliu (1907), Diego Ruiz (1908) and Cèsar August Jordana (1928). The main purpose of this article is to show that Sagarra’s translations marked a turning point regarding the translation of Shakespeare’s works in Catalan culture. This is done by reflecting on both cultural and personal circumstances that led Sagarra to translate Shakespeare and by comparing Sagarra’s translation of Macbeth with the other three from the first half of the twentieth century.

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Author Biography

Vanessa Palomo Berjaga

Vanessa Palomo Berjaga teaches translation from English into Spanish and from Catalan into Spanish and vice versa at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). She also teaches English at the Universitat de Manresa (Universitat de Vic / Universitat Central de Catalunya). In addition, she is a freelance translator and reviser. Her research interest is literary translation, especially the translation of Shakespeare’s plays into Catalan. In her PhD thesis, she analyses Josep Maria de Sagarra’s translation of Macbeth (http://hdl.handle.net/10803/393969). She has written on the French influences on the Catalan translation of Macbeth by Sagarra, a shift model to identify influences between translations and the stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and James Joyce’s Ulysses. ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7133-250X.

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