Salt Water

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.

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.