We don't always look at the translators, those who appear among the credits of the books of our favorite authors. But here you are than Pàmies in his translation tasks of the inexhaustible Amelie Nothomb It is so noticeable that it ends up attracting attention. And one day you decide to take a look at the translator's work.
Sergi Pàmies is not as prolific as Nothomb. Perhaps because with translating such a frenetic author Sergi already has enough work to do. And even with that, Sergi ends up polishing his works to the most intense shine, with that meticulousness of the translator, eager on this occasion to be as faithful as possible to his own imagination.
Stories and stories to color the sketch of a reality that is always lacking in life. Sergi Pàmies is immersed in this task whenever he can. Volumes of intrastories committed to the most intimate story, drawing on the universe that each character carries within to compose the fullest life in the resulting cosmos. Characters who move between great fictions and small fantasies, as we all do...
Top 3 recommended books by Sergi Pàmies
If you eat a lemon without making faces
We learn to overact by eating a lemon in bites. Or also peeling onions very closely. Our most significant physiognomy changes not to impacts but to sensations. Like the characters in this volume, who can adopt a look loaded with centuries in a moment of loss, or who can shine like the child who discovers his first gift from kings.
If you eat a lemon without making faces combines everyday and fantastic situations that delve into common emotions that are easy to identify with. Unrequited love, mistrust, family dependencies, excess loneliness or company, and unsatisfied desires are some of the elements that characterize this book.
With an ironic, incisive and contained look, Sergi Pàmies portrays the servitude of vulnerable characters, slaves to circumstances that, like lemons, have the contradictory power of being acidic and refreshing at the same time.
At two it will be three
There are changes that happen in the most unnecessary and gratuitous way. Leaving the existential comfort zone can be the most inappropriate of decisions, something like forcing two to be three just because. Then the consequences always come, with their sense of folly when it is discovered that always, always, something is lost. And never, never will what is gained end up compensating for what is lost.
In the stories of At Two Will Be Three the boundaries between fiction and genres are blurred: what at first seems like an autobiographical review ends up becoming a game where fantasy plays a fabulous role, always at the service of a narrative that He constantly gallops between the most insightful irony and his ability to cope with failures and everyday experiences.
True to his unmistakable voice and style, the ten stories that make up this book resemble ten intimate confessions: coexisting here, for example, is an author who investigates the implicit relationship between his first sexual experience and his first literary exercise, a father who asks his son to introduce him to the universe of dating apps, a playwright with depressive tendencies who must face the tragic story of his grandmother's death or a couple who tries to tell each other how much they love each other and ends up to say, unintentionally, quite the opposite.
Through his diaphanous, elegant and eloquent prose, Pàmies delves into the domain of delicacy and digression, with a resignedly uncertain look at the passage of time.
The art of wearing a trench coat
Maybe it comes because of the detail, the culmination that artfully closes any last page of paper or life. The trench coat is not a garment to be worn casually, it is little less than the cape of the most mundane hero. And we have to be heroes day in and day out. Better to adjust the raincoat well to turn the end of each scene into a glorious farewell.
Conceived as a concentrate of memory, emotion and narrative pleasure, the thirteen stories in The Art of Wearing a Trenchcoat confirm Sergi Pàmies' ability to observe and master short distances.
With an increasingly refined style, in which feelings and details are the protagonists, the book combines childhood episodes, portrays the old age of his parents, reflects on the romanticism of disappointment or the panic of living up to expectations. children's expectations.
From the individual perplexity of adolescence to the collective scars of the 11th century (the XNUMX/XNUMX attacks, the Spanish Transition, the fratricidal fall of communism, exile), Pàmies expands his repertoire of concerns with irony, causticity, melancholy and lucidity and finds in the fascination with the absurd and the muscle of surprise the most effective antidotes to combat absences, failures and other servitudes of maturity.
