«I have prohibited the Spanish translation of the book. By contract. I do not want to contribute to bilingualization of Catalan literature». Júlia Bacardit, a Catalan writer who has defended in an interview published this week that she has only vetoed Spanish, and no other language, in her latest work, ‘A sentimental dietari’, has shown herself to be so blunt.
Bacardit, who is also the co-author of the podcast ‘Les golfes’, had previously published in Spanish. In fact, in the interview, published in Elnacional.cat, she points out that her book ‘The price of being a mother’, which was an essay on egg donation and everything that entails, sold more in Spanish that in catalan “It was a more journalistic book, I didn’t mind that they translated it for me,” he explains.
On the contrary, Bacardit highlights that ‘Un dietari sentimental’ is, as its name suggests, much more personal and “that makes me even clearer [el prohibir la traducción al castellano]». «Also for the moment in which we are, in a very clear decline of Catalan», assures the writer.
“A little thing we can do for our tongue”
“At the moment the decision I have made is quite firm,” the writer reiterates during the interview, while insisting that “this decision, this refusal, is a small thing that we writers can do for our language.” “The only contribution I can make, the only small victory, is that my Spanish-speaking friends read me in Catalan, instead of reading me translated. And it is not out of moral superiority: if I do it, it is because it is very important to me, it is personal and it really hurts me », she defends.
In the book, Bacardit reflects in the first person on some of his intimate experiences, but also on literature and journalism, and speaks explicitly of the “sore tongue” In this sense, he reiterates that his feelings about the language could be understood by “Basques, Galicians and other bilingual people from the Spanish State”.
