Bio

Juan de Sola (Barcelona, 1975) studied Philosophy and Literary Theory in Barcelona, Berlin and Paris. He works as a freelance translator and editor since 2002. He specialises in translation of literature, criticism and essays on modern and contemporary art. He has been a teaching fellow at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and is currently working on his PhD about the concepts of criticism and translation in Goethe and Schiller. He has translated into Spanish works by Goethe, Marcel Proust, Jacques Rivière, Robert Walser, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Malcolm Lowry, Gabriel Josipovici, Jean Paul Richter, Rainer Maria Rilke and Marianne Fritz, among many others. He has been awarded various distinctions and prizes, among them the Premio Ángel Crespo (2018) for his version of the Correspondence between Proust and Rivière. In 2018 and 2019 he received an «Übersetzungsprämie» from Austrian Federal Chancellery for his translations of Rilke and Marianne Fritz.

Project

The aim of my residency at Faber is to prepare a new edition and translation into Spanish of a selection of Marcel Proust’s «Essays», which should be published in 2022 to mark the centenary of the author’s death. After having already made a first selection of the essays on art and literature published in Proust’s lifetime and included in the French canonical editions, I would like to enrich it, on the one hand, with previously unpublished archival material (especially drafts) and, on the other, with letters and other personal writings. In many ways Proust’s Correspondence is a laboratory for reflection and discussion on the aesthetic proposal of his work, but also on the work of other authors, either appreciated or detested. In many cases, moreover, Proust used the letter form to cover what is undoubtedly an essay, as in the well-known text about Flaubert, which he published as a letter to Jacques Rivière in «La Nouvelle Revue française».