Transplanting the jocs florals: The floral tradition, translation and the imagining of a multilingual literary sphere in modern Iberia

Abstract

This article approaches the role of translation in Iberian literary modernity not as a question of importation of foreign models from Europe but rather as a question of the circulation of texts and cultural traditions within Iberia. It focuses on translation projects that originated within and among Iberian cultures in the nineteenth century, and that projected themselves outward. This study proposes a genealogy that links the revival and spread of floral games in Catalonia and across Spain beginning in the 1850s to translation practices in the Peninsula in the early twentieth century. After an analysis of the relationship between the spread of the floral games and the perception of their decadence in Catalan literary historiography, the article proposes an alternate understanding of the phenomenon that links the floral tradition to translingual cultural projects. Particular attention is paid to the ‘polyglot edition’ of Catalan poet Joaquim Rubió i Ors’ Lo Gayter del Llobregat (‘The piper of the Llobregat River’) (1888–1902). This publication, like the floral tradition that proliferated alongside it, reflects an effort to create a multilingual literary sphere anchored in the Iberian Peninsula that Spanish and Catalan literary histories have overlooked.