Gabriel Ferrater, Traductor de Gottfried Benn

What is it about?

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 permit us to explore the writer-translator issue, among other questions of relevance within the field of Translation Studies.

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