The publishing house Settecolori has released in Italian one of Josep Pla’s most important works: El quadern gris. Translated by Stefania Maria Ciminelli, this is a luxury edition featuring explanatory paratexts. It was presented in December in Rome at the Più Libri Più Liberi book fair. The presentation was led by Xavier Pla, author of A Thieving Heart, the biography of the Empordà-born writer.
Newspapers such as La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, Il Foglio, and Il Manifesto devoted extensive coverage to the event, as El quadern gris is considered Pla’s masterpiece. He wrote it as a personal diary between October 13, 1918, and May 25, 1919. Particularly noteworthy are the words of Tommaso Pincio in La Repubblica, who describes Pla as “an indefatigable memoirist, as well as the greatest writer in the Catalan language and one of the most important authors of twentieth-century Europe, even though among us he still remains virtually unknown.” Pincio recalls that Pla referred to this diary as “just a kilo and a half of paper” or “just a young boy’s diary,” and yet, he notes, “it is precisely this prosaic detail — the kilo and a half — that should make us reflect. When has a banal notebook ever come to weigh so much?”
El quadern gris was published in 1966, when Pla was nearly seventy years old, after years of rewriting it. Giulio Silvano also highlights this aspect in Il Foglio: “it creates a silent yet perceptible dialogue between two stages of life, two different intensities, two different ambitions.” Finally, Elisabetta Rosaspina writes in Corriere della Sera that “by 1966 it was no longer a notebook, either in form or in content, but rather a portrait of Catalan society and history, of the ordinary and illustrious figures who animated it, both in Palafrugell and in the capital. Of gray, it retained only the name and the cover of the original manuscript, which barely reached one hundred pages.”
In Italy, only Pla’s travel books L’illa de Sardenya and Cartes d’Itàlia had previously been published, in 1990 and 1994 respectively. Following the success of El quadern gris in translation, there are hopes that other works by the Catalan author will also be published in Italian, thus correcting what specialists, critics, and Italian journalists consider to have been an anomaly. In this regard, Xavier Pla provides further details about the reception of El quadern gris by Italian literary critics and about Pla’s ties with Italy in the article “Josep Pla, a Catalan ‘Beffardo’”, published in Quadern El País.
