{"product_id":"salt-water-isbn-9781939810724","title":"Salt Water","description":"\u003cb\u003ePeter Bush, winner of the Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious (and often tasty!) depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. After describing the process of beating an octopus with branches to soften up its flesh, Pla writes, \"These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort.\" Pla inflects the mundane with the hidden rhythms of power sculpting culture, so that a hot supper is never just food--it embodies economic precarity and environmental erosion along with its own peculiar flavor. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.\"He travels with smugglers, narrates the stories of storms and shipwrecks that he hears on boats and in cafés and listens to fishermen, bar-tenders, sailors, layabouts, cooks, crooks and eccentrics. You could call most of them eccentric, author included . . . The translation reads immaculately . . . With pride, Josep Pla talks in Salt Water of his fierce coast in his and its battered language. He both observes and shares the dreams, traditions, food and culture of its people.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Michael Eaude, \u003ci\u003eCatalonia Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Pla’s stories are generally unadorned and precise in their renderings of both the people and the places of the far northeast of Spain, lives full of hardship and labor—but also their insistence on freedom. A fine introduction to a writer little known outside his native land and who memorably captures its atmosphere.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e, Starred Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The grand old man of Catalan letters and one of Spain's most prolific writers.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e--Chicago Tribune \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In each essay, the reader is swept up and carried along . . . Pla’s style, ably translated here by Peter Bush, is glorious and precise.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Lamorna Ash, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eSalt Water\u003c\/i\u003e is a pescatarian’s dream, replete with hearty, fishy repasts, generally washed down with bottomless carafes of local wine… With its quiet undercurrents of irony and fatalism, Josep Pla’s way of “giving time a slower rhythm” will add savor to a summer day, whether you find yourself on a porch, in a hammock, or snug in a bunk on a humble, but honest boat.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Nicie Panetta, \u003ci\u003eFrugal Chariot\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eSalt Water\u003c\/i\u003e benefits from Pla’s  prolific career collecting pithy observations from sources, which helped the author generate idiosyncratic characters and iconoclastic literary insights . . . His unique prose, suffused with love, exists in a space between stoic observation and daydream.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e--\u003c\/i\u003eColton Alstatt, \u003ci\u003eZyzzyva\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Josep Pla has long been considered one of the finest writers of autobiographical texts in any of the languages of Spain.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e--Hispanic Review \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Considered one of the most influential Catalan authors of the twentieth century, [Pla] was born and raised in the Emporda, and over the course of his life wrote over 30,000 pages of prose in which he diligently catalogued the landscape and the life and habits of the people of the region. His complete works, published and republished over the years, contain marvelous descriptive passages that capture the landscape's history and its complex topography at once.\"\u003cb\u003e \u003cbr\u003e--Words Without Borders \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Josep Pla was a great noticer of things and places; his gaze was alert and dry; he wrote in a style which registered both the smallest detail and the large picture. His relationship to Catalan identity and Spanish history was complex, often ambiguous. His relationship, however, to the scene in front of him, or the days in which he lived, remains fascinating for its clarity, its sharpness, its originality and its wit. On display in his work is a glittering and sparkling sensibility.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Colm Tóibín\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A seafood stew of the finest variety, [\u003ci\u003eSalt Water\u003c\/i\u003e] is a travel guide in the form of literature that also has that hard, gritty authenticity of seafaring experience… You could almost wipe the sand from the roads [Pla] travelled off the pages of the book.\" \u003cbr\u003e-- \u003cb\u003eCliff Sargent of \"Better than Food\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Pla truly shines as a writer . . .  Through this lens he shows the world a time and place that has largely been lost to record . . . \u003ci\u003eSalt Water\u003c\/i\u003e is a treasure.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e--Scott Mashlan, \u003ci\u003eColorado Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/b\u003eJosep   Pla was a great noticer of things and places; his gaze was alert and dry; he   wrote in a style which registered both the smallest detail and the large   picture.\u003cbr\u003e — Colm TóibínJosep  Pla (1897-1981) was born in Palafrugell on the Costa Brava. After  abandoning law for journalism, Pla moved to Paris to serve as the  correspondent for the Spanish newspaper La Publicidad. Pla went on to  cover current events from Russia, Rome, and London, as well as Berlin,  where he reported on Mussolini's march on Rome and the collapse of the  German economy. He returned to Madrid in 1927. Under the Franco regime,  Pla was internally exiled to Palafrugell and his articles for the weekly  review Destino were frequently censored.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePeter  Bush is an  award-winning translator who lives in Oxford. Among his  recent  translations are Josep Pla's The Gray Notebook, which won the  2014  Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, and Ramón del   Valle-Inclán's Tyrant Banderas; Emili Teixidor's Black Bread, Jorge   Carrión's Bookshops, and Prudenci Beltrana's Josafat.STILL LIFE WITH FISH\u003cbr\u003e Then, my dear friend, we lived in Fornells – not in the Fornells that is in Menorca, a shabby, squalid spot,\u003cbr\u003e but Fornells in our country, a sheltered, delightful place. After wandering the world for so long, after so\u003cbr\u003e much futile, wearisome activity, it was time for me to stop for a moment and rest a while. It was the right\u003cbr\u003e decision: I went for a couple of weeks, and was still there a year later, far from hunger, work and stress.\u003cbr\u003e At the time Fornells had no church, no public clock, no local government office, no embodiment of\u003cbr\u003e legal authority. There wasn’t even a cemetery, which is surprising, given there are so many cemeteries in\u003cbr\u003e this world. It meant those of us who lived there thought we would never die. If in the event anyone did, tears\u003cbr\u003e prompted by the presence of death turned to icy anguish and the coffin was carried along the most unlikely\u003cbr\u003e paths. There was an excellent source of water, under pine trees, with a large wash-place where young girls\u003cbr\u003e with gleaming teeth and moist gums went to wash. In winter when the gods brought downpours, there was a\u003cbr\u003e rush of water like a woman’s translucent thigh, green-blue veins under a pinkish body of water.\u003cbr\u003e Small, nondescript houses were scattered around, connected to a distant hamlet by a series of tracks\u003cbr\u003e and shortcuts. There wasn’t anything one could describe as an appreciable urban mass. Men and women, old\u003cbr\u003e and young, all told we must have been some thirty-five individuals, and the houses we occupied were\u003cbr\u003e detached, and separated by some distance. It would have been an exaggeration to call it a village: they were\u003cbr\u003e simply fishermen’s houses set on a rocky landscape, in the most sheltered spots, surrounded by evergreen\u003cbr\u003e mastic trees – small, whitewashed houses clinging to the ground, roofs touching the rock face, doors open to\u003cbr\u003e the sea, pine branches giving a little shade to their façades. Rather than a strategy to communicate with\u003cbr\u003e others, those houses represented a way of living extremely solitary lives.\u003cbr\u003e Everything that goes with human life was there: no house was without a cat or two; three or four\u003cbr\u003e dogs, of complex, mongrel stock, had settled in the area; a cockerel heralded our dawn; two old, shaggy,\u003cbr\u003e good-natured asses seemed like remnants from a past long destroyed. Culture – what people generally call\u003cbr\u003e culture – was little in evidence. There were no teachers and the laws related to state education were ignored.\u003cbr\u003e If they wanted to study, children would have had to cover seven to ten or twelve miles there and back:\u003cbr\u003e commonsense dictated that they went when they had nothing else to do, and even then it wasn’t a foregone\u003cbr\u003e conclusion. We didn’t even have a single wretched volume of the Espasa Calpe dictionary to consult. We\u003cbr\u003e received one or other of the daily newspapers, very late, in the form of wrapping around rice, noodles or\u003cbr\u003e beans, which we rushed to read – or rather daydream over – if their dense pages didn’t first disappear into\u003cbr\u003e the kitchen stove or the fire in the hearth. Women, in particular, had no respect for the printed page and were\u003cbr\u003e always short of paper. It is undeniable: Fornells, in that era, was no hotbed of culture. Nevertheless, if you\u003cbr\u003e wanted life with the taste of oblivion and remoteness that nervous exhaustion craves, it was a wonderfully\u003cbr\u003e mellow place.\u003cbr\u003e Sheltered from northerly winds by the Cape Begur cliffs, the land sits there like a earthenware dish\u003cbr\u003e on its geological base – a sunny dish, open to the sun rising across the sea, and closed to the sunset by the\u003cbr\u003e mountains. The land is poor but has been admirably cultivated with the noblest of crops: ancient silvery\u003cbr\u003e olive groves, carob trees, cypresses, evergreen pines, almond trees and vines. Contemplated through their\u003cbr\u003e majestic forms, sometimes bending under the richness of their sap, the sea was something bright and\u003cbr\u003e beautiful, like an unexpected reassuring gift from nature. In early February, when almond trees blossomed\u003cbr\u003e above the small ears and beady eyes of broad bean plants, the sea loomed across a pink haze. Bathed in the\u003cbr\u003e wintry sun, the sweet yellow of the mimosas dazzled. Bronzed green oleanders had a reddish glow. Agave\u003cbr\u003e plants on rocky ridges were streaked with an egg-yolk yellow. A scent of rosemary, gorse and lavender\u003cbr\u003e floated in the air along paths melding with pine resin: it was a refreshing smell, a tangy, innocent delight\u003cbr\u003e abroad.","brand":"Archipelago","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304732872933,"sku":"NP9781939810724","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781939810724.jpg?v=1767736067","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/salt-water-isbn-9781939810724","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}