It would have done Catalan literature an incalculable favor if more humorous books had been translated in the last thirty or forty years. Catalonia is a country that, in terms of literature, has oscillated between the most flamboyant lyricism – let’s leave aside the great Noucentisme poetry, which is the best we’ve had in the 20th century, including all genres – and a neo-medieval, or late romantic, epic, particularly visible from the Renaissance theater… to the mediocre Apple and the one: that of and that of . There have been some novels that used the procedure of irony – which just means distancing; it does not reach the category of humor—but it has not been predominant.
Humor is a human virtue – unknown to animals, who do not laugh, and only oscillate, like the bulk of our literature, between the lyrical (the nightingale) and the epic (the wolf, the wild boar) – that seasons the life of any person provided, no matter how little, with what we rightly call a “sense of humor”, and which is present in French in mot d’esprit, in English in wit, in German in Witz—Freud devoted a whole book to it, The joke and its relationship with the unconscious— and in Spanish in the ingenio, as understood by Cervantes, Quevedo and Gracián, for example.
In France humor of the best quality was manifested in the work of Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac, Scarron and Voltaire; Germany, especially during Romanticism, in the books of Jean Paul Richter, Hoffman or Heine. But the masters of humor, in the letters of the continent, were and still are the English, where there has not been a century that they did not contribute handfuls of sand: Chaucer already makes you smile; Shakespeare lavishes humor in his theater; and then humor has not ceased to be one of the basic ingredients in the English literary gastronomy: see Fielding, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler—glorious Hudibras, unfortunately untranslatable—, the members of the Scriblerus club—Swift, Pope, Aburthnot—, Charles Lamb, Dickens, Chesterton… and so on up to Joyce. (We are not talking about the “comic” authors, such as Woodehouse or Sharpe: that is an amplificatio of what concerns us today in this piece.)
In Catalonia, translations of books by Erckmann-Chatrian and Jerome K. Jerome were published in the 1920s – present directly or indirectly in many books from the Sabadell group, such as; and let’s not talk about the great Joan Oliver—, who indicated an attachment to humor that has almost disappeared today, especially in his own production, with notable exceptions such as Quim Monzó’s.
But, as has been said, the best humor in literature is to be found in English letters. , the unsurpassed publisher of Anagrama until a few years ago, published an anthology of English humor that was not noticed at all: The best English humor (Anagrama, 2009), with texts in which quiet humor and guts were mixed. And if the reader is eager to go deep into the matter, let him visit Stephen Potter’s book, Sense of Humor (New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1954), with texts ranging from Shakespeare to Graham Greene. There is no one missing, among them Samuel Johnson, one of the greats of the 18th century, the most humorous of English letters after Swift and Sterne. This lexicographer, man of letters and genius, starred in a book by James Boswell that has made history in English bibliography – will we ever have a Catalan translation?
Hester Lynch Piozzi published about him in 1786 – a recent book, then – some Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson which are for dipping bread in (no tomato, please; just oil or wine). It reads as follows: “There is a malevolent tendency among many people to suppose that an old man loses his mental faculties. If a young man or a middle-aged man, after spending an evening in company, does not know where he has left his hat, it means nothing; but if the same oversight is discovered in an old man, people will shrug their shoulders and say, ‘he’s a fool.'” “A gentleman who introduced Dr. Johnson to his brother he wanted Johnson to be considerate, and said, ‘After we have sat with him a little while, he will see how my brother becomes more and more interesting.'” “Don’t worry: I have the whole day off,” said Samuel, “two ladies, having found his dictionary, had not put any foul words in it Johnson, ‘what have they sought?'” “A gentleman who had been very unhappy in his marriage married a second time, immediately after the death of his first wife, and Johnson said of him: ‘It is evident that his conduct has been the triumph of hope over experience.'”
If the reader has smiled even a little, Johnson and the quídam can already take it for granted.
