More Than a Century of Dostoevsky in Catalan

This essay explores the factors that shaped the introduction and dissemination of Dostoevsky’s works in the Catalan cultural sphere, focussing on several different stages of the author’s translations into Catalan. In the late 1800s, Russian literature was largely unknown in Catalonia; interest grew due to the public’s fascination with Russian political movements and the fin de siècle avant-garde, as well as the agitational political climate in Spain. The Catalan intelligentsia typically accessed new aesthetic forms through French publications, including Russian literature: the first translations from Russian to Catalan were thus made through French. However, surprisingly, Dostoevsky’s works entered the Catalan literary world through German translations, with his first translator, Juli Gay, using German texts as source material for his Catalan versions of ‘An Honest Thief’ and ‘The Landlady’ in 1892. This resulted in less stylistic distortion from the original than in other language versions translated from French. In the early 1900s, other works by Dostoevsky were translated into Catalan using French pivot texts; the first direct translations were published in 1929, namely Crime and Punishment by Andreu Nin and The Eternal Husband by Francesc Payarols, two of the most prominent names in Russian-Catalan translation history. During Franco’s dictatorship, literature and cultural expressions in Catalan were banned, reducing new translations. In recent decades, the number and quality of direct translations of Dostoevsky into Catalan have grown, though some major works still await translation.