Cosmopolitanism, Minority, Translation: Eduard Màrquez’s Zugzwang

What are the tensions when a small culture cultivates a cosmopolitan outlook? How does an author seek the consecration enabled by a major language? Eduard Màrquez’s collection of Catalan flash fiction, Zugzwang (1995) draws on the experimentalism of recent United States narrative to create a distinctly Catalan work. An English translation of the Catalan text can at once expose and interrogate its literary and cultural conditions.

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Professor Lawrence Venuti (Temple University) is a leading authority on the theory and history of translation. His books, such as The Translator’s Invisibility (2 nd edn, 2008), The Scandals of Translation (1998), and Translation Changes Everything (2013), have opened up the study of translation to a wide readership and changed the way we think about the subject. Venuti’s own translations (from Catalan, French, and Italian) include the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss (2006), and Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems (2009), for which he won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize.