| |
Prizes & Publications
Further evidence of the Society's wish to participate fully in the cultural life of Catalonia is the fact that until a few years ago it had always offered a prize at the Jocs Florals de la Llengua Catalana. The prize was awarded to the best unpublished translation of a poem or poems from English into Catalan or the best piece of work whose main material was concerned with the cultural or historical connections between Catalonia and Great Britain.
Notable among the prizewinners were Joan Triadú for his translations of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Josep Carner for Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Jail, Josep G. Llauradó for a selection of poems by Louis Macniece, and Eduard Feliu i Marbres for T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland and a selection of poems by W. H. Auden. However in the changing circumstances following 1975, and since for some years the prize had attracted no candidates, it was considered more appropriate that the prize money should be used to increase the value of the Society's Scholarship.
Fulfilling its commitment to publicize Catalan culture to as wide an audience as possible in Great Britain, in 1977 the Society took charge of the editing of a special number of Vida Hispánica, a journal published by the Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. The number which was produced as a result of this fruitful co-operation between the Association and the Anglo-Catalan Society ran to over 2000 copies and was wholly given over to Catalan culture. It contained articles introducing readers to the Catalan language and its literature, the history of Anglo-Catalan relations from medieval times to the present day, and the subject of Catalonia within post-war Spain. The issue was well received by the readership and to a large extent achieved its aim of making an influential sector of British Hispanists aware of the Catalan situation and at the same time extending knowledge of the Society's existence from its main area, the university world, into that of secondary education. A second publication of this kind is planned which will focus on political and cultural developments in the Catalan Countries over the past sixteen years.
In 1979 the possibility of starting up a publication of its own was discussed by the Society. However, instead of producing a journal or bulletin, it was decided to publish a series of monographs on Catalan topics (The Anglo-Catalan Society Occasional Publications), and these appear from time to time, guided by an editorial committee, and as finances permit. So far ten titles have come out, all of them reflecting an editorial policy designed to present work which includes a certain amount of new research and at the same time offers information about Catalan subjects essentially for English-speaking readers. The first in the series was published in 1980 - an elegant study of 80 pages by Salvador Giner (formerly of Brunel University) entitled The Social Structure of Catalonia, a subject on which the author had previously addressed the Society at its meeting in 1979. A second edition was produced in 1984 (78pp.). The second in the series was J. Salvat-Papasseit: Selected Poems, 1982 (84pp.), (parallel texts) comprising translations and introduction by Dominic Keown and Tom Owen. There followed Modern Architecture in Barcelona (1854-1939), 1985 (80pp.), a study by David Mackay which also began as a paper to the Society, and Homage to Joan Gili: Forty Modern Catalan Poems with English Prose Translations, 1987 (100pp.), translations made by members of the Society and a full introduction by Arthur Terry, to mark the eightieth birthday of our Honorary Life President, Joan Gili. In 1988 Alexandre de Riquer (1856-1920): The British Connection in Catalan Modernism (140pp.) appeared, a piece of original research by Eliseu Trenc and Alan Yates. Number 6 in the series, Primera Història d'Esther, English Version, the Story of Esther, by Salvador Espriu (100pp.), with introduction and translation by Philip Polack, came out in 1989. At the end of 1991 an enlarged and up-dated version of a paper given to the Society in 1986 by Miquel Strubell i Trueta was produced as The Catalan Language: Progress towards Normalisation (100pp.), by Jude Webber and Miquel Strubell; the eighth volume in the series, Ausiàs March: A Key Anthology, edited and translated (parallel texts) by Robert Archer (128 pp.) was published at the end of 1992. Next came Contemporary Catalan Theatre: An Introduction, edited by David George and John London (1996), and finally, 1998 saw the publication of Readings of J.V. Foix: An Anthology, edited by Arthur Terry with a series of complementary studies by various authors.
The high levels of sales achieved by these books, both in the English-speaking world and in the Catalan Countries themselves, are a measure of the success of the series, and the Society plans to continue publishing titles on various aspects of Catalan culture over the coming years.
The series as a whole is dedicated to the memory of the inspiring light of the Anglo-Catalan Society, the late Dr J. M. Batista i Roca, who was also one of the most frequent academic contributors to the annual meetings. |
|
