Gabriel Ferrater, Traductor de Gottfried Benn

Abstract

Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) is one of the most controversial and representative twentieth century German writers. Because of the biased reception he had in Europe, it took a very long time for his work to be esteemed in Spain. However, against the prevailing atmosphere of the Franco regime, in October 1957 (just a year after Benn's death) the Catalan writer Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972) translated into Spanish 12 of the poems of Benn's expressionist poetry work Morgue (1912). It is the aim of this paper to assess Ferrater as a translator, placing emphasis on the relevance of the fact that, in this case, he exceptionally translated poetry (when as a general rule he chose both fictional and nonfictional works in prose) —significantly when not even a year had passed since his own poems had first been published. The starting point will be a comparative study and assessment of Ferrater's two translations of the poem "Negerbraut" ("La novia del negro"), in verse (1957) and in prose (1964) respectively, which will...