Under the Dust review

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From New Welsh Review
Summer 2007 No.76

REVIEWS

The agonies of the Civil War
Amanda Hopkinson relishes a Catalan classic

Under the Dust
Jordi Coca translated by Richard Thomson (Parthian £9.99)

Who is Jordi Coca? In Catalonia he is well-known as a theatre director, playwright and drama instructor, director of Barcelona’s Theatre Institute in the 1980s and ‘90s. He is also known as an author and translator of some thirty books, including numerous stage adaptations of (among others) Maeterlinck, Ibsen and Sophocles. His translations of the Japanese poet and monk Matsuo Basho were the first into Catalan, and his fascination with Japan is a theme running through his novels (one of which is called La Japonesa).

Most significantly, perhaps, he started publishing in his twenties when Franco was still in power. Since the self-styled Generalissimo endorsed only one national language – versus the half-dozen indigenous to Spain – it was an act of subversion to write in Catalan. From his first novel, Els Lluisos to his most recent Cara d’Angel, Jordi Coca has collected an impressive array of literary awards. And since Franco’s death in December 1975, Coca has become a media star of screen and print, his Catalan credentials standing him in excellent stead in the renaissance of regional cultural identity over the past thirty years.

This book is something different. A personal account of growing up during the drear dark years of the 1950s and ‘60s, Sota la Pols won the highest Catalan prize for literature, the Premi San Jordi in 2000. It is the first of Coca’s works to be translated into English (by the highly proficient Welsh writer Richard Thomson) so serves as an introduction to an author with no previous track record here. Previously unknown to us here, we will read him differently to the Catalans, and primarily for the revelations he provides of one of the most vicious and vindictive European Fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

The full transcript of this review is published in New Welsh Review Summer edition

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