1st Edition
Valencian Folktales, Volume 2 Enric Valor
Enric Valor (1911–2000) is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. He has been, until now, almost completely unknown to an English-speaking audience. Following the publication of Valencian Folktales (2023), this second collection of his tales will help to consolidate work done on Valor in English, opening up both his fiction and the specificity of Valencian culture to Anglophone readers. The stories included here offer a sampling of the various types of tales he wrote: magical-theme tales, local-color tales and tales with personified animals. Valor collected these stories from the inhabitants of small towns and villages in the south of the Valencian territory and later gave them a polished, literary reworking. They are characterized by a detailed and lyrical treatment of the landscape and natural habitat of the region and an entertaining sense of humor. The selection begins with an introduction written by Maria-Lluisa Gea-Valor, co-translator and the author’s granddaughter. It provides a brief background to Valor’s biography, discusses the selected tales in the context of the folklore tradition and examines issues of the translation process, ranging from general considerations to more specific aspects.
1 Introduction
Maria-Lluïsa Gea-Valor
2 Don Joan of Bathkit o’Bwed
3 The Prince Who Lost His Memory
4 The Giant of the Rosemary Bush
5 The Demon that Smoked
6 The Castle of Return and No Return
7 The Blacksmith of Bèlgida
8 The Boy Who Was Born Feet First
9 Three Lawsuits at Pentecost
10 The Festival Chicken
11 Beginneta, Seconetta and Finisetta
Biography
Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer (retired) in American Literature at the Universitat de Valencia. He has published three collections of essays in English and has co-authored a number of bilingual (English-Spanish) critical editions of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams and Sarah Orne Jewett. He is co-editor of Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (2007) and is also one of the co-editors of The Companion to Richard Berengarten (2016) and Managing The Manager: Critical Essays on Richard Berengarten’s Book-length Poem (2019).With Miguel Teruel, he has translated Berengarten’s Black Light into Spanish (2012) and, with Viorica Patea, has translated eight books by Romanian poet Ana Blandiana into English (My Native Land A4, 2014; The Sun of Hereafter & Ebb of the Senses, 2017; Five Books, 2021). A further volume of Blandiana’s poetry is slated for publication in 2024. His critical essays, translations and poems have appeared in many print and electronic journals in both Europe and the US.
Maria-Lluïsa Gea-Valor is a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the Universitat de Valencia. Her research interests lie in the fields of genre analysis, written academic discourse and literary translation. She has specialized in evaluative and promotional genres such as the blurb and the book review. Her work has been published in prestigious journals in her field such as Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of English for Specific Purposes, and Ibérica, as well as in the volumes Academic Evaluation: Review Genres in University Settings (2009), Constructing Interpersonality: Multiple Perspectives on Written Academic Discourse (2010) and Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres (2014), among others. She has co-edited several books on applied linguistics, corpus linguistics and translation, and has recently co-authored the book A Practical Introduction to English Phonology (2012).
This second volume of Enric Valor’s Valencian Folktales fully matches the first in psychological subtlety, mastery of narrative twist, impish humour, resonant passion, and nuanced human warmth. While their particular Valencian flavours are deliciously evident, their themes, arising out of oral tradition, resonate with a universal, archetypal authenticity.
Richard Berengarten, English poet and Bye-Fellow, Downing College, Cambridge
This translation of Valor’s folktales, depicting landscapes and ways of life through a language rich in expressivity, internationalizes Valencia’s cultural patrimony. To make the Valorian folktales available in English is to recognize his work as a part of the European ethnopoetic tradition.
Verònica Cantó, President, Academy of the Valencian Language
There is nothing more powerful than a good story. Through the brilliant translation by Paul Scott Derrick and Maria-Lluïsa Gea-Valor, this book encompasses a trove of powerful folktales that open up a literary universe full of dream-like notes and practical teachings that lend voice to a culture’s will to persevere.
Vicent Martines, Professor of Medieval Catalan Literature and Romance Relations, and Translation Studies. ISIC-IVITRA, Universitat
d'Alacant
