Joan Sales i Vallès

Joan Sales i Vallès (Barcelona, November 19, 1912 – November 12, 1983) was a Catalan writer poet, translator and editor.[1] His best known work is the novel Uncertain glory (recently translated into English[2]).

As editor, he founded with Xavier Benguerel Club Editor, the publisher house of The Time of the Doves from Mercè Rodoreda and Bearn o La sala de les nines from Villalonga, among other important works. He was a promoter of the journal Quaderns de l'exili ("Exile notebooks").

He was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1982.

For 500 years, the Catalans have been fools. Is it, then, stop being Catalans? No, but stop being stupid.
— Joan Sales (Barcelona, 1912–1983)

Biography

Joan Sales i Vallès was born November 19, 1912,[3] at the Eixample district of Barcelona, in a family originally from Vallclara, in Conca de Barberà. His family was very outskirts progresses, at a political level, from traditionalism to the Catalan nationalism closer to Lliga Regionalista. On the occasion of ruin business suffered by the father, the family is determined to shut Vallclara, although Sales, already became bachelor in Lleida, he moved to Barcelona in the early age of seventeen.

Joan Sales acted very young in opposition to the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera.He was also one of the first Catalan language teachers of the official census of the Generalitat of Catalonia formed by Pompeu Fabra.[4]

He graduated in law from the University of Barcelona in 1932, is affiliated with Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, which will leave soon. At the outbreak of Spanish Civil War, he was graduated from the School of War and was appointed official.[4] He went to the fronts of Madrid and Aragon, due to the sadness caused him by the anarchy in the rear and the desire to maintain the power of the Republican Government of Generalitat[4] In 1933 he marries with Maria Núria Folch, Catalan publisher, with whom he had a daughter the same year: Núria Sales Folch.

He met the poet Màrius Torres, who was already ill of tuberculosis. Both would be united with an intense friendship and both maintained an effusive correspondence until the death of Màrius, in 1942. From Màrius Torres he receives a deeply literary influence.

In 1939 he went into exile in France and then, in 1940, in the Dominican Republic, from where to Mexico in 1942. He worked there as linotypist. In exile, he drove a deeply ideological journal, Quaderns de l'Exili (1943–1947). His text Els Òrsidesis a criticism to the intellectuals that do not assume the critical challenges of the country. From there, he edited with notes and studies, L'Atlàntida, Canigó, La nacionalitat catalana and the first edition of Poesies from Màrius Torres (1947).[4]

Once returned to Catalonia in 1948, he focused on publishing tasks, discovering essential authors to the modern Catalan literature (Màrius Torres, Llorenç Villalonga and Mercè Rodoreda).[4]

In 1955, he founded with Xavier Benguerel and Joan Oliver El Club dels Novel·listes, with which they wanted to expand the readership Catalan, developing a narrative and a more popular level language more accessible.[4]

Since its imprint, el Club Editor, he will offer to the public his work Uncertain glory ("Incerta glòria"), that do not appeared in definitive edition until 1971 and his epistolary war and exile Letters to Màrius Torres (1976). Other works include the book of poems Viatge d'un moribund (1952), his translations from Kazantzakis and Dostoyevski or the outline of a comic opera, music by Joan Altisent, En Tirant lo Blanc a Grècia.[4]

Sales was documentary and commentator of Historia de España and also of Història dels Catalans form Ferran Soldevila, and he wrote numerous works prologues for books from Joan Coromines, Mercè Rodoreda and Llorenç Villalonga. He directed the Diputació de Barcelona Office of Catalan until he retired (1982). Posthumously, Contes d'ahir i d'avui (1987) and his correspondence with Mercè Rodoreda (2008) were published.[4]

He died in Barcelona on November 12, 1983 and was buried in Siurana (Cornudella de Montsant, Priorat). Núria, his wife, who died in 2010, was buried beside her.

Works

Awards

References

  1. ↑ Joan Sales i Vallès [Joan Sales i Vallès] (in Catalan). Barcelona: Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana. Retrieved April 8, 2015.
  2. ↑ "Surt al mercat "Uncertain glory", traducció a l'anglès d'"Incerta glòria"". www.naciodigital.cat. Nació Digital. October 2, 2014. Retrieved April 8, 2015.
  3. ↑ "Joan Sales i Vallès". escriptors.cat. AELC. April 8, 2015. Retrieved April 8, 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Joan Sales i Vallès". Generalitat of Catalonia. Retrieved August 27, 2012.

External links

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