First, we take Stalingrad...

Symmetries of the world, symmetries of the soul: Days of Coronavirus (Hypermedia), by Jorge Ferrer, reaches my hands. The first reaction is defensive. In my opinion, there are tons of coronavirus diaries, confinement diaries, etc., in the world that contribute little or nothing if you are not a second cousin of the person who wrote them. And sometimes not even then.

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Anyway, whether he has a cousin or not, whether he has a grandmother or not, Jorge Ferrer is very much Jorge Ferrer. He is a very cultured Cuban who has been living in Barcelona for a long time, where he struggles to subsist from writing. He is the go-to Russian translator for several very serious publishing houses. Among them, Galaxia Gutenberg, the apple of Joan Tarrida's eye. Tarrida went from directing Círculo de Lectores to piloting a beautiful fighter jet that, every time it takes off, brings in first-rate pieces for Spanish readers around the world. Stalingrad, by Vasily Grossman, has just landed. A major work by any measure. But if, on top of that, it is viewed through a titanic task of recovery and reconstruction of the many fragments of the work mutilated by Soviet censorship —which in this case came within a few millimeters of literary clitoral ablation, with all due respect—, the matter is undoubtedly magnified.

It turns out that Ferrer, Jorge Ferrer, precisely, the Cuban Ferrer who has spent years of passionate exile in Barcelona —a city that he seems to have learned to manage intimately like an island—, well, it was precisely this man who had to translate, not Stalingrad in its entirety, but each and every one of the bits that the censors of the old USSR had been tearing off with bites. He has translated, relocated, and made visible in the text everything that was missing. Decensoring as one who revives a dead person. Rise and walk.

This Chinese work, even more than Russian, God willed that it fall to Jorge Ferrer in the midst of the first wave of the coronavirus, during the first forty days of stubborn confinement. Time, his time, split like a coconut into two halves: in the morning, Ferrer fought on the Stalingrad front. In the afternoon, he wrote a diary about the coronavirus, a series of reflections that were initially published in the Mexican magazine El Estornudo (which is already something…) and have ended up taking shape, well, in the recently edited volume by Hypermedia.

I believe that this story would have powerfully caught my attention in any case. But if it also came pushed under pressure by a disturbing symmetry… who knows. It turns out that I also spent those first forty days of confinement tied to the hard bench of translating a book with the name of a city, in turn associated with a military event full of heroism and disaster. In my case, more modest but no less heartfelt, it was about Gerona, Benito Pérez Galdós's National Episode entirely dedicated to the horrifying siege of Girona for seven long months in 1809 by Napoleon's Grande Armée. Although I was not translating from Russian, but from Spanish to Catalan, and I did not have to break knot after knot of censorship, but something more ambiguous and more murky. Something more related to a sad, deliberate insistence on oblivion.

I did not keep a parallel diary, like Jorge Ferrer. But I did intersperse my translation with "interludes" or experiential notes, with the aim of connecting the tragedy of the past with the drama of the present.

They say that when you do something with love, joys burst forth everywhere. One of the latest, as bittersweet as you like, but joy in the end, has been this unexpected, furtive brotherhood, between Jorge Ferrer translating Stalingrado confined in Barcelona and myself translating Girona confined in Madrid. Each in their place, both besieged, I mean. Touching each other with the tips of our fingers from all our soul cities as on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

By the way, Ferrer, in his diaries, does not refrain from mentioning a novel that impresses me a lot, Anna Karenina. For the novel itself and for its most famous translator into Catalan: Andreu Nin. Do you remember him? He once met Josep Pla in Moscow, whom he invited to a kind of Soviet paella in a dacha... Pla would leave written record of it, as hilarious as it was merciless…

Let's live well while we can. And if they lock us up again, let it be with good books. And with the immense people who wrote them.