Portbou: A Catalan Memoir; with Stories from We, Women - Softcover

Roca, Maria Mercè

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936671662 ISBN 13: 9781936671663

Publisher: Pinyon Publishing, 2020

Synopsis

Maria Mercè Roca’s tender narratives illustrate the potency of language: “the supplications were like a song and if I said them over and over I became drunk from the rhythm and the words, in a kind of ecstasy.” A profound security is derived through shared conversations, as when her father picks her up from school: “You carry the suitcase and, at first, we walk fast without saying anything as if we were afraid they’d make us go back. When we’ve covered a bit of distance we look at each other and begin to laugh. … I calm down and … nothing seems so tragic any more.” As well as wounds incurred and deepened by silence. From a trauma of police brutality scraping at the interior mind and body—to a child punished by her mother’s refusal to speak or look at her. Many layered, the architecture of steps, ceilings, and train tracks structure the waxing and waning of human life and death.

About this title

About the Authors

Maria Mercè Roca is a prominent Catalan writer who has published numerous novels, books of short stories, texts for young people, and has written for Catalan television. She has received some of the most prestigious prizes in Catalonia for her work. After recent years in the Catalan Parliament as a member of a party promoting independence, Ms. Roca has returned to writing full time with the publication of another novel, Al final, t'agradaré (You Will Like Me in the End).

Sonia Alland translates from the French and the Catalan: She has translated works by the French writer, Marie Bronsard, and the poetry in French by Salah Al Hamdani. From the Catalan, Ms. Alland has done a selection of Maria Mercè Roca's short stories and is translating selected poems by the Catalan poets, Salvador Espriu and Narcis Comadira.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pinyon Publishing
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1936671662
• ISBN 13: 9781936671663
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136