Salt Water

by Josep Pla, Peter Bush (Translator)

Overview

Peter Bush, winner of the Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers.

Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious (and often tasty!) depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. After describing the process of beating an octopus with branches to soften up its flesh, Pla writes, "These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort." Pla inflects the mundane with the hidden rhythms of power sculpting culture, so that a hot supper is never just food--it embodies economic precarity and environmental erosion along with its own peculiar flavor. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939810731
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	310
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Josep Pla (1897-1981) was born in Palafrugell on the Costa Brava. After abandoning law for journalism, Pla moved to Paris to serve as the correspondent for the Spanish newspaper La Publicidad. Pla went on to cover current events from Russia, Rome, and London, as well as Berlin, where he reported on Mussolini's march on Rome and the collapse of the German economy. He returned to Madrid in 1927. Under the Franco regime, Pla was internally exiled to Palafrugell and his articles for the weekly review Destino were frequently censored.

Peter Bush is an award-winning translator who lives in Oxford. Among his recent translations are Josep Pla's The Gray Notebook, which won the 2014 Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, and Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Tyrant Banderas; Emili Teixidor's Black Bread, Jorge Carrión's Bookshops, and Prudenci Beltrana's Josafat.

Read an Excerpt

STILL LIFE WITH FISH
Then, my dear friend, we lived in Fornells – not in the Fornells that is in Menorca, a shabby, squalid spot,
but Fornells in our country, a sheltered, delightful place. After wandering the world for so long, after so
much futile, wearisome activity, it was time for me to stop for a moment and rest a while. It was the right
decision: I went for a couple of weeks, and was still there a year later, far from hunger, work and stress.
At the time Fornells had no church, no public clock, no local government office, no embodiment of
legal authority. There wasn’t even a cemetery, which is surprising, given there are so many cemeteries in
this world. It meant those of us who lived there thought we would never die. If in the event anyone did, tears
prompted by the presence of death turned to icy anguish and the coffin was carried along the most unlikely
paths. There was an excellent source of water, under pine trees, with a large wash-place where young girls
with gleaming teeth and moist gums went to wash. In winter when the gods brought downpours, there was a
rush of water like a woman’s translucent thigh, green-blue veins under a pinkish body of water.
Small, nondescript houses were scattered around, connected to a distant hamlet by a series of tracks
and shortcuts. There wasn’t anything one could describe as an appreciable urban mass. Men and women, old
and young, all told we must have been some thirty-five individuals, and the houses we occupied were
detached, and separated by some distance. It would have been an exaggeration to call it a village: they were
simply fishermen’s houses set on a rocky landscape, in the most sheltered spots, surrounded by evergreen
mastic trees – small, whitewashed houses clinging to the ground, roofs touching the rock face, doors open to
the sea, pine branches giving a little shade to their façades. Rather than a strategy to communicate with
others, those houses represented a way of living extremely solitary lives.
Everything that goes with human life was there: no house was without a cat or two; three or four
dogs, of complex, mongrel stock, had settled in the area; a cockerel heralded our dawn; two old, shaggy,
good-natured asses seemed like remnants from a past long destroyed. Culture – what people generally call
culture – was little in evidence. There were no teachers and the laws related to state education were ignored.
If they wanted to study, children would have had to cover seven to ten or twelve miles there and back:
commonsense dictated that they went when they had nothing else to do, and even then it wasn’t a foregone
conclusion. We didn’t even have a single wretched volume of the Espasa Calpe dictionary to consult. We
received one or other of the daily newspapers, very late, in the form of wrapping around rice, noodles or
beans, which we rushed to read – or rather daydream over – if their dense pages didn’t first disappear into
the kitchen stove or the fire in the hearth. Women, in particular, had no respect for the printed page and were
always short of paper. It is undeniable: Fornells, in that era, was no hotbed of culture. Nevertheless, if you
wanted life with the taste of oblivion and remoteness that nervous exhaustion craves, it was a wonderfully
mellow place.
Sheltered from northerly winds by the Cape Begur cliffs, the land sits there like a earthenware dish
on its geological base – a sunny dish, open to the sun rising across the sea, and closed to the sunset by the
mountains. The land is poor but has been admirably cultivated with the noblest of crops: ancient silvery
olive groves, carob trees, cypresses, evergreen pines, almond trees and vines. Contemplated through their
majestic forms, sometimes bending under the richness of their sap, the sea was something bright and
beautiful, like an unexpected reassuring gift from nature. In early February, when almond trees blossomed
above the small ears and beady eyes of broad bean plants, the sea loomed across a pink haze. Bathed in the
wintry sun, the sweet yellow of the mimosas dazzled. Bronzed green oleanders had a reddish glow. Agave
plants on rocky ridges were streaked with an egg-yolk yellow. A scent of rosemary, gorse and lavender
floated in the air along paths melding with pine resin: it was a refreshing smell, a tangy, innocent delight
abroad.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Josep Pla was a great noticer of things and places; his gaze was alert and dry; he wrote in a style which registered both the smallest detail and the large picture.
— Colm Tóibín

Editorial Reviews

"He travels with smugglers, narrates the stories of storms and shipwrecks that he hears on boats and in cafés and listens to fishermen, bar-tenders, sailors, layabouts, cooks, crooks and eccentrics. You could call most of them eccentric, author included . . . The translation reads immaculately . . . With pride, Josep Pla talks in Salt Water of his fierce coast in his and its battered language. He both observes and shares the dreams, traditions, food and culture of its people."
—Michael Eaude, Catalonia Today

"Pla’s stories are generally unadorned and precise in their renderings of both the people and the places of the far northeast of Spain, lives full of hardship and labor—but also their insistence on freedom. A fine introduction to a writer little known outside his native land and who memorably captures its atmosphere."
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"The grand old man of Catalan letters and one of Spain's most prolific writers."
—Chicago Tribune

"In each essay, the reader is swept up and carried along . . . Pla’s style, ably translated here by Peter Bush, is glorious and precise."
—Lamorna Ash, Times Literary Supplement

"Salt Water is a pescatarian’s dream, replete with hearty, fishy repasts, generally washed down with bottomless carafes of local wine… With its quiet undercurrents of irony and fatalism, Josep Pla’s way of “giving time a slower rhythm” will add savor to a summer day, whether you find yourself on a porch, in a hammock, or snug in a bunk on a humble, but honest boat."
—Nicie Panetta, Frugal Chariot

"Salt Water benefits from Pla’s  prolific career collecting pithy observations from sources, which helped the author generate idiosyncratic characters and iconoclastic literary insights . . . His unique prose, suffused with love, exists in a space between stoic observation and daydream."
—Colton Alstatt, Zyzzyva

"Josep Pla has long been considered one of the finest writers of autobiographical texts in any of the languages of Spain."—Hispanic Review

"Considered one of the most influential Catalan authors of the twentieth century, [Pla] was born and raised in the Emporda, and over the course of his life wrote over 30,000 pages of prose in which he diligently catalogued the landscape and the life and habits of the people of the region. His complete works, published and republished over the years, contain marvelous descriptive passages that capture the landscape's history and its complex topography at once."
—Words Without Borders

"Josep Pla was a great noticer of things and places; his gaze was alert and dry; he wrote in a style which registered both the smallest detail and the large picture. His relationship to Catalan identity and Spanish history was complex, often ambiguous. His relationship, however, to the scene in front of him, or the days in which he lived, remains fascinating for its clarity, its sharpness, its originality and its wit. On display in his work is a glittering and sparkling sensibility."
—Colm Tóibín

"A seafood stew of the finest variety, [Salt Water] is a travel guide in the form of literature that also has that hard, gritty authenticity of seafaring experience… You could almost wipe the sand from the roads [Pla] travelled off the pages of the book."
— Cliff Sargent of "Better than Food"

"Pla truly shines as a writer . . .  Through this lens he shows the world a time and place that has largely been lost to record . . . Salt Water is a treasure."
—Scott Mashlan, Colorado Review

From the Publisher

★ 2020-10-14
Joined sketches, ostensibly fictional but with the ring of lived truth to them, by the noted Catalonian writer.

As translator Bush remarks in an afterword, Pla’s (1897-1981) chronicles of his seafaring compatriots were supposedly written during the author’s youth. Most, in fact, were from the 1940s, when, working as a journalist, Pla made a specialty of sneaking subtle criticisms of the Franco dictatorship into his copy. Sometimes his resistance is less than subtle. In one story, the narrator is conversing with “Dalí the painter’s father,” as he prefers to be called, and recounts, “In the Ampurdan, we federal republicans and those who didn’t think like us created a most pleasant level of coexistence, which had eliminated all forms of brutality….We’d rage at each other, but there was mutual respect. All that was destroyed thanks to theories about human progress and happiness.” Most of the stories are laden with references to the glories of Catalan cuisine, so much better, Pla asserts, than the butter-heavy French cuisine up the coast; in just about every story, someone is eating anchovies and sardines and sea bream, and it’s a book not to be read on an empty stomach. In just about every story, too, there is a reminder not just of food, but also of the antiquity of the Mediterranean; a Zorba-like character with the Greek-ish name of Hermós, for example, claims that the people along the cape he inhabits are indeed Hellenes, for “those Greeks were no fools. They chose to come and live in the best of places.” Blending both themes, the narrator later rejoins, “The spectacle of avid hunger becomes this antique sea. There are corners of this sea where you can smell the stench of Homeric hecatombs.” Pla’s stories are generally unadorned and precise in their renderings of both the people and the places of the far northeast of Spain, lives full of hardship and labor—but also their insistence on freedom.

A fine introduction to a writer little known outside his native land and who memorably captures its atmosphere.

Kirkus Reviews