The many lives of Mireia: Maria-Antònia Salvà’s translation of Frederic Mistral’s Mirèio

Abstract

This article analyses three different editions of Maria-Antònia Salvà’s translation of Frederic Mistral’s Mirèio (1859) in the early years of the Catalan diaspora after the Civil War and in Francoist Spain: Mexico (1946), Majorca (1948), and Barcelona (1959). It investigates the ideological transformations of Mireia as a result of the pressures on Catalan culture throughout time. The paratexts are designed to condition the interpretative framework of Mireia as a text of political and cultural resistance. Whereas the 1948 edition significantly lacks a prologue, the prologues of the other two editions recodify the source text within the contemporary Catalan milieu, metaphorically connecting Catalan and Occitan subalternity. The domestication and recodification of Mirèio became an affirmation of Catalan culture and language at a time of severe political repression.

Keywords:

• Frederic Mistral
• Maria-Antònia Salvà
• Francoist Spain
• resistance
• censorship
• translation
• Catalan
• Occitan

Notes

1. When Catalan was reinstated officially after Franco’s dictatorship, the newly established Catalan television, TV3 was equally ruthless with the Fabrian modality of Catalan. Those journalists coming from other areas of the Catalan-speaking territories had to speak normative Catalan while on air.

2. Whereas 25% of drama and 17.11% of novels were severely affected by censorship, only 9.6% of poetry was. Likewise, 57.89% of drama and 60% of novels were not affected by censorship at all in contrast with the much higher 83.4% of poetry (Abellán 1980, 83–4). In fact, during the early years of the dictatorship, only Catalan poetry was allowed to be published on a regular basis (Gallofré i Virgili 1991, 295).

3. When the mayor of Llucmajor (Majorca) asked permission for the publication of Salvà’s Obres completes in December 1944, he underlined how her poetry praised Majorca’s “alma y […] tradición cristiana” (cited in Gallofré i Virgili 1991, 197).

4. Regarding this point, in 1944 Ferrà knew that time was on their side owing to the changes in the political climate that the end of WWII would bring about (Lladó i Rotger 1996, 111).