Translate and assimilate? The selected verse of Vicent Andrés Estellés in English

Abstract

Informed by Gideon Toury’s descriptive approach and Even-Zohar’s polysystems, this article concerns itself with a holistic consideration of the environmental pressures which circumscribe the experience in the specific case of translation from a minority language (Catalan) to the lingua franca of the modern age. The bi-lingual edition of the selected verse of Vicent Andrés Estellés (2013) is posited not only as an example of the varied ideological positionings which separate and unite the creative art of the Valencian and his similarly combative counterparts from the North of Ireland (Kavanagh and Heaney) but also as a marker which reveals the limitations of the introspective exclusivity of the Catalan critical tradition when contrasted with the exogamy of the Anglo-American convention. The binaries predicted by polysystemic theory – centre versus periphery, unity versus diversity, officiality versus heterodoxy, etc. – attest to the wealth of this artistic interplay as understood in the Anglo-Irish context whilst offering an appreciation of the deficiencies of the process of literary reception in Catalonia as epitomised by the domestic incapacity to assimilate fully the genius of the Valencian writer.