Mary Ann Newman is translating a Catalan tradition for New Yorkers. For more than ten years, Newman has helped organize NYC’s iteration of the Sant Jordi Festival—otherwise known as the Day of Books and Roses—that celebrates the Catalan tradition and highlights literature in translation.
A writer, translator, and active member of PEN America’s Translation Committee, Newman curates the festival under the tenet that literature in translation is a channel for cross-cultural discourse. In this interview with Membership Engagement Manager Aleah Gatto, Newman speaks about the exciting line up of this year’s festival and shares her thoughts about the progression of bringing literary translation into the limelight in the United States.
The Sant Jordi Festival, also known as the Day of Books and Roses, is steeped in the rich literary history of Catalonia. Can you talk about the origin of the festival and its significance in Catalan culture?
The origin is the legend of St. George the Dragon Slayer. Sant Jordi—Saint George—is the patron saint of Catalonia, as well as England, Malta, and Lithuania (he’s very popular). As the legend goes, there was a fire-breathing dragon that was attacking the walled city of Montblanc. The dragon demanded sheep and goats or else it would burn the town down. And when they ran out of livestock, he demanded humans. The town drew lots and the king’s daughter got the short straw. She was dressed as a bride going down to the river to meet the dragon, then Sant Jordi showed up. He wounded the dragon, and from the blood that fell from his wounded wing, a rosebush sprang up. That’s why gentlemen give their ladies a rose on Saint George’s Day (Diada de Sant Jordi).
Sant Jordi started in the 15th or 16th century, but in the 1920s, the Catalan Booksellers Association and the Barcelona Booksellers Guild decided to mix books into the rose festival, held on April 23rd, which is now International Book Day. It was so successful that, now, ten percent of all the books sold in Catalonia are sold on Sant Jordi.
In Catalonia, most of its seaside towns have promenades to the sea that used to be canals. For those boulevards and promenades to be lined with book stands and flower stalls is just gorgeous.
Can you tell me how this epic celebration found its way to the United States, and how you came to co-organize its NYC iteration?
As long as there have been Catalans in New York, they have been gathering to celebrate Sant Jordi. My co-organizing organization, the Catalan Institute of America, another centenary organization, used to organize events celebrating Catalan literature. In 2014, we decided we wanted to go beyond the Catalan-speaking, because Sant Jordi in Catalonia is not exclusively about Catalan literature. It’s about literature. We wanted to reflect that, and we also wanted to embrace people beyond the Catalan community. The first time we did that—we organized a lit crawl in DUMBO—we were able to do it thanks to the PEN America Translation Committee. Everybody was very enthusiastic about having an opportunity to read from their translations of authors from Poland, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Mozambique, and Catalonia. It was quite the party. We were like the Pied Pipers of Hamelin, picking up new readers as we went from bookstore to bookstore.
How has the festival transformed over the years?
There have been really important transitional moments. One of them was 2020, because we were planning lit crawls in five neighborhoods when Covid shut us down. Since we were working with the extraordinary multimedia artists, Laia Cabrera and Isabelle Duverger, who were going to do projection mappings on buildings, when we learned that all our plans were dashed, I asked them what they would think of going online. Within three hours, they came up with a concept and Isabelle had a sketch for a landing page. We became the webpage for other literary festivals that year, including the PEN World Voices Festival and its Translation Slam. The most important thing was that we discovered our international audience: people were tuning in from Finland, Iceland, Iraq. Sinan Antoon read from his new publication, The Book of Collateral Damage. After the U.S. and Spain, Iraq was the country from which we had most website visits. There were people in Finland seeing writers who were reading from Japan, et cetera. It was incredible.
Last year, our website had 35,000 visitors, and people come throughout the year because it’s simply there. In 2022, we went back to doing in-person events, in addition to online events, and you can find all of that on the website, as well.
The most important development since 2020 is that, this year, the West Village Business Improvement District (BID) is hosting us. This means that the city devotes a percentage of the taxes paid by businesses in the district to improve the atmosphere of the neighborhood, which can include second garbage pickups and more security, as well as cultural events. Working with the West Village BID, on April 26th, we’re going to close down Christopher Street and have book stalls and food and beverage tastings. Books, roses, and food! So that’s really exciting.
What does this year’s festival look like in terms of the types of languages that we’ll see and events that you’re looking forward to?
To honor the West Village’s literary history, we’re hosting an online conversation with Luisa Valenzuela, the Argentine novelist who lived in the West Village in the ‘90s, and Suzanne Jill Levine, who is the translator of Manuel Puig, the Argentine author of Kiss of the Spider Woman, who also lived there from 1963-1973. Jill is a good friend of Luisa’s and was also running around in the village in those days. Luisa will be reading a piece from a novel she wrote that takes place in the West Village, and Marguerite Feitlowitz will read her English translation. It will be a jumping off point for talking about the atmosphere of being a Latin American writer in The Village. Jill will regale us with anecdotes, some taken from her biography of Puig. She is a master schmoozer with a capacious memory of those days.
For the in-person events, on April 24th, we’ll be presenting Ara Merjian’s translation of Aram’s Notebook, a 1997 novel by Catalan author Maria Àngels Anglada, who died in 1999. It’s important for these times because it’s the story of the Armenian Genocide told from the perspective of a mother and son who escaped the massacre because they were on a pilgrimage. Professor Merjian of NYU will be in conversation with Professor Aurélie Vialette of Yale. And we hope to have a special guest who I can’t quite mention.
There will also be a beautiful in-person event with Emma Ramadan and Julia Sanches. Emma translates from French and Julia from Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. Both have translations coming out this year by authors of North African origin who are writing from Europe: Munir Hachemi from Madrid, Meryem el Mehdate from Tenerife, and Abdellah Taïa from Paris. Their writings push back against this monolithic idea of what North African writers living in Europe are experiencing. I think it’ll be a really compelling conversation.
In a similar vein, Jennifer Shyue will be reading her translation of A Blind Salmon by Julia Wong Kcomt, a writer of Chinese Peruvian descent. In this way, we will be reflecting the question of migration as a vein of modern literature. Considering the current attitude toward immigration, it’s really important to be focusing on that.
When we highlight all of these international literatures through English, we are bringing them an audience that they would not have otherwise.
As a longtime member of PEN America, a writer, and a translator, you undoubtedly carry a wellspring of experience advocating for greater attention to be paid to literary translation in the U.S. In your experience, what efforts have seen the greatest success?
There have been a lot of things. There was Chad Post, who started the Three Percent blog, which discussed the terrible statistic that, of all the books published in the U.S., only three percent were published in translation (and that’s not talking only about literature—that includes medical textbooks and things like that). Bringing attention to that and making that shameful percentage part of the conversation was very important.
Since then, translation has begun to come into its own. I can remember an event maybe twelve or fifteen years ago at which a renowned editor (whose name I won’t mention) said that putting a translator’s name on the cover was automatically to lose buyers. It was the general atmosphere at the time. Thankfully, that feeling has changed, in part because of some translation successes: books by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, Karl Ove Knausgård, translated by Don Bartlett, and Geetnajli Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, have become best sellers. All of these things have made it impossible for an editor to make that argument anymore.
There’s still a terrible lag in books in translation getting published but you can point to these bestsellers and say, “Hey, give it a chance.” As an agent once remarked, a translation is a good bet because it’s already been vetted in another country in another language and reached the top of the pile. Publishers like Jill Schoolman of Archipelago, Edwin Frank of New York Review of Books, Chad Post of Open Letter have made translation more visible. They’ve created a narrative of international literature. There has been an incredible groundswell in the past twenty years thanks to very specific people. And there are many more beyond New York City and State (my provincialism is showing).
What advice would you give to PEN America’s community of writers, translators, and advocates for uplifting the work of literary translators?
Above all, read. Try to fit one book in translation into your reading schedule. And when you’re planning events, if you’re an event planner, try to include a cross-cultural or intercultural translation by including translated literature. Nobody’s better than PEN’s community of writers and translators to begin to establish that as a practice rather than an exception.
I would also say that people should come to the Sant Jordi Festival!
Absolutely: check out our website. There’s always wonderful stuff there: you’ll find things from other years and you can search for languages. It’s a wonderful resource.
Is there anything else that you’d like to share about the Sant Jordi Festival, advocacy, or the art of literary translation?
In international publishing, English is the great monster. Every other language translates from English, but English doesn’t necessarily translate from the other languages. One of the things we’ve discovered in doing Sant Jordi over the years is that, if we are giving a platform in English for the literatures of the world, we’re kind of countering that role of English as the three hundred-pound gorilla. It doesn’t matter if you’re a minoritized or lesser-known literature. Except for English, French, German, maybe Italian, and Russian, most literatures are lesser-known. How many books are translated from Hungarian in a year? When we highlight all of these international literatures through English, we are bringing them an audience that they would not have otherwise. For example: Catalan exists in a position of disadvantage in Spain vis-a-vis Castilian, just as Spanish does vis-à-vis English in New York, or Quechua vis-à-vis Spanish in Peru. When Catalan or Assamese is on a platform in English next to books in Castilian or Hindi, they’re all the same. The celebration is a useful medium for international literatures to bump up against one another. And it’s nice for English to be able to be a communicating vessel for other languages and cultures, which is a role I like to think we share with the PEN World Voices Festival.
Mary Ann Newman is a translator by vocation and cultural administrator by profession. She has translated such major Catalan authors as Quim Monzó, Josep Carner, Josep Maria de Sagarra, and Joan Fuster. Her professional life has revolved around Catalan and Hispanic literatures and cultures. She was the founder of the Catalan Studies Program and the Catalan Center at New York University. She is the founder and executive director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the U.S., President-delegate of the jury of the Premi Internacional Catalunya (International Catalonia Award), and, as of March 2025, a Corresponding Member of the Institute for Catalan Studies. In 1998 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi (Cross of St. George), the highest honor awarded by the Catalan government and was awarded the 2017 North American Catalan Society Prize and the J-B Cendrós Award from Òmnium Cultural for her translation of Sagarra’s Private Life, and the 2022 Ramon Llull International Award for Cultural Diversity.
