March 31, 2025:
Sant Jordi rides again in New York City!
On April 26th Saint George, the legendary savior of damsels in distress, scourge of firebreathing dragons, will land on Christopher Street!
The most beautiful book fair in the world is coming to the West Village.
On April 23rd, in Barcelona and towns and cities throughout Catalonia, bookstands and flower stalls line the streets and boulevards.
Now the Catalan festival of books and roses is coming to the West Village, the cradle of American literature. Mark Twain meets Quim Monzó! Patricia Highsmith meets Mariana Enríquez! Willa Cather meets Mercè Rodoreda!
Christopher Street will blossom with bookstands and roses and food and drink and music and poetry! Children’s games and adult games! Vermouth and honey and a special Sant Jordi pastry from the Gremi de Pastissers de Barcelona (Pastry Chefs’ Guild of Barcelona).
The feast of Sant Jordi has been celebrated for centuries in Barcelona - the Catalan Parliament adopted Sant Jordi as its patron saint in 1456. The actual historical figure of Saint George was declared a saint and martyr for refusing to persecute the Christian minority under the orders of the emperor Diocletian…
(Totally in favor of a knight who refuses to persecute a minority.)
…and April 23rd, the day of his death, became Sant Jordi’s Day.
As time went on, Sant Jordi’s legend grew fanciful. When a fire-breathing dragon threatened the walled city of Montblanc, the frightened townspeople sacrificed their livestock to save the town.
One day, there were no more sheep or goats. And the dragon continued to roar and spew flames. The king decided that the town would draw lots to see who would be sacrificed first. And, lo!, his daughter drew the shortest straw.
As the princess made her way to face the dragon, Sant Jordi suddenly appeared. He defended the princess with his sword and wounded the dragon’s wing. Where the drops of blood fell to the ground up sprang a rosebush. This is why for centuries gentlemen would give their ladies a rose in Catalonia.
In the late 1920’s the Barcelona Booksellers’ Guild had the grand idea of adding books to the festival and the day for lovers to give roses became a day for giving books and roses. Imagine! Valentine’s Day with books!
(Totally in favor of lovers reading books…)
EVENTS:
Wednesday, April 23, 6-8 p.m.
The West Village: Cradle of (Latin) American Culture: The West Village is the cradle of American literature—and that includes Latin American literature. And Spanish literature. We will explore these hidden writers with Esther Allen, biographer and translator of José Martí; Suzanne Jill Levine, biographer and translator of Manuel Puig, and Luisa Valenzuela, acclaimed Argentine novelist and former Village dweller. Moderated and orchestrated by Marguerite Feitlowitz.
8-10 p.m. West Village Video mapping by Laia Cabrera & Isabelle Duverger (Laia Cabrera & Co.)
An immersive video mapping projection on the façade of a historic building in the West Village as part of the Sant Jordi Festival, a celebration of literature, culture, and tradition. It will intertwine the rich literary history of the West Village with the iconic Catalan tradition of books and roses, creating a dynamic visual narrative that bridges cultures through storytelling and digital art.
Thursday, April 24th, 6-8 p.m.
Catalan Women Writers: Frustration, Rage, and Compassion
Hot off the presses, Aram’s Notebook, translated by Ara Merjian (Swan Isle Press, 2025), is the story of a mother and son who escape the Armenian genocide because they have embarked on a pilgrimage. Professors Merjian and Aurélie Vialette will read from and discuss the novel.
The exquisite literary review, THE COMMON, has devoted a dossier to Catalan women writers. Marialena Carr and Mary Ann Newman will read from their translations of Mònica Batet and Maria Antònia Vicenç and talk with editor Stephanie Malak about the issue, and Ara Merjian and Aurélie Vialette will return to discuss the issues.
Friday, April 25, 6-8 p.m.
Upending European Literature: Who Sets the Canon?
How does our view of European literature change when we go beyond the canon or usual (male) suspects to include the perspectives of women, translators, and those with multiple identities?
Kate Deimling will launch the event with her translation of Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni’s The Story of the Marquis de Cressy, in conversation with translator Gary Racz. The book was a best-seller, Diderot was a fan, and yet over the centuries she was erased from literary history in favor of male writers.
Julia Sanches and Emma Ramadan will read and discuss how writers of North African origin are undermining stereotypical expectations of what constitutes the immigrant and first-generation experience in Europe, from the perspective of the novels of Munir Hachemi from Madrid, Meryem El Mehdati from the Canary Islands, and Abdellah Taïa from Paris.
Author Cécile Wajsbrot and translator Tess Lewis will then read from and discuss finding the language to mirror repeating European traumas in Nevermore, Wajsbrot's novel about translating Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
The six participants will then come together on the stage to speak more broadly about these new angles into European literature, the act of translation, and what these books have to offer to contemporary readers across the globe.
Saturday, April 26, 12-5 p.m.
Street Fair: Books, Roses, Music & Food
on Christopher St (between 6th Av & Waverly St)
With Kids Activities, DJ, Live Music, Readings and more...
Live performances by:
- Alexis Cuadrado on bass, with spoken word by Pyeng Threadgill (Catalan/American collaboration)
- Nana Simopoulos, guitar, sitar and voice on vocals and keyboards, with Alexis Cuadrado on bass and Caryn Heilman
- NOIA summons up the extraterrestrial dynamics of Björk’s “Hyperballad” on “reveal yourself,” layering airy falsettos and distorted, pitched-up vocals over a shuffling four-on-the-floor pulse. On the moonlit “otra vida por vivir,” featuring Maria Arnal, she weaves in and out of Catalan beside stuttering circuitry and a gentle but rapturous house-like beat.
- Paloma Toll is a New York City young singer-songwriter and guitarist blending indie folk and pop influences.
Readings by:
- Marti Salas, Mary Ann Newman and Marialena Carr reading Catalan poetry
- Ross Perlin, author of Language City
- Stine An, Korean-American poet, reading translations from the following forthcoming publication of poet Yoo Heekyung's work in English
- Peter Carlaftes, Kat Georges, Andrei Codrescu, Jane LeCroy: poets attached to Village presses (Three Rooms and Pink Trees)
- Silvia Albert Sopale, the brilliant Afro-Spanish actress and playwright currently in residence at NYU’s Espacio de Culturas
8-10 p.m. West Village Video mapping by Laia Cabrera & Isabelle Duverger (Laia Cabrera & Co.)
Much more to come!
2024
April 25, 2024:
OUT OF THE BOX THEATER: SANT JORDI NYC 2024 IN PERSON
Today, April 25th, we welcome you to the in-person, in-theater, in-the-flesh launching of Sant Jordi USA. Yesterday we launched the online festival, which continues this afternoon and runs through Saturday at santjordiusa.org/live.
We are looking forward with great anticipation to today’s performances and readings. Here is a bit of a rundown, which only skims the surface:
Check Date, Esther Casas’s delightful short stop-motion love story (with a serious streak), has a bit of the knight and princess action on the chess board that will lead with panache into Professor Scott Bruce’s exploration of the world of dragons. Bruce will explain both the story behind Sant Jordi and why we are now in a golden age of dragons.
Bruno Lloret and Daniel Saldaña París will honor the spirit of the festival by zooming in their translators, Ellen Jones and Christina MacSweeney and homing in on translation - the dynamics of the art? craft? and the relationship for all four of them between translation and creation. Some topics they may touch on include translation as play and the different levels of language; the problem of translation and how it serves writing; limits and freedom: solving the riddle.
Daniel Saldaña París will then put on a different hat, discussing with Brian Robert Moore his translations of the stories of Michele Mari—one of which was recently chosen for the new O.Henry collection! and Brian has chosen to read The Broken Arrow, his favorite story about translation.
Pivoting from this heady accent on translation (partial pun partially intended) we will be swept away on the tranquility of Qualia — You Matter to Me, an immersive cinematic experience from filmmaker Laia Cabrera and visual artist Isabelle Duverger, who are also the geniuses behind our beautiful website and illustrations. This will give us the peace of mind and body to enter into the world of Keith LaMar, a poet on death row, whose artistic collaboration with Albert Marqués, a New York-based Catalan jazz pianist and composer, is a beacon of hope, jazz, poetry, and resistance.
We will segue from there into Creamen, another stop-motion animation short film by Esther Casas, this one with an environmental theme, and we will close with the unjustly little-known poetry of Felícia Fuster, a Catalan poet and painter, whom Marialena Carr has rescued for the English language. Marialena will wear two hats—maybe literally— reading both the Catalan originals and her English translations.
Join us at the Out of the Box Theater at 154 Christopher Street. This is going to be amazing.
April 24, 2024: Sant Jordi USA is approaching NYC...
Today we launch online, Worldwide!
After a beautiful start in Chicago with a presentation at Sem Coop bookstore of the brilliant new anthology Best Literary Translations 2024, by Alta L. Price, Izidora Angel, Lizzie Davis, and coeditor of the collection, Noh Anothai, Sant Jordi USA is launching with a special section devoted to this same collection, spotlighting different authors and translators.
Sant Jordi USA is particularly delighted to partner with Best Literary Translations, a new yearly anthology focusing on literatures of the world In English translation, as our missions dovetail perfectly.
Since 2014, Sant Jordi USA—then Sant Jordi NYC—has been devoting the celebration of this beautiful Catalan book festival to literatures of the world, with particular devotion to lesser-known or minoritized literatures. And a little extra love for Catalan literature, of course.
Please enjoy these readings of literature translated from Kurdish, Spanish, Tagalog and Wayuu taken from Best Literary Translations 2024 (Deep Vellum)
More to come: A Focus on the Mediterranean Diet with Master chefs Jaume Biarnés and Alba Sunyer talk about The Catalan Table as the author, Alba Sunyer, prepares bacallà amb samfaina.*
And an extraordinary Special focus on Translingual writing from Latin America, in Nahuatl, in English, Spanish and Spanish-English, in Didxazá (Ishtmus Zapotec), and in … Icelandic! More on this to come!
See full program here!
*Friends, we have tried the recipe, and it is succulent and foolproof.
April 24, 2024:
THE CATALAN TABLE, Alba Sunyer and Jaume Biarnés
Since 2021 Sant Jordi USA has been celebration the Mediterranean Diet. We invite you to visit the amazing videos we presented that year from Ferran Adrià, Carme Ruscalleda, Josep Roca, Christian Escribà, and several other chefs who appear in THE CATALAN TABLE, which we are presenting today.
Master chefs Alba Sunyer and Jaume Biarnés will discuss Sunyer’s THE CATALAN TABLE, available in the U.S. on Amazon books, as Alba prepares and cooks “Bacallà amb samfaina,” a classic Catalan dish. (Cod with samfaina, a traditional vegetable sauce--post-Columbian, to judge by the tomato)
Friends, watch carefully: I followed Alba Sunyer’s technique, fil per randa (step by step), and it is simple and extraordinary. For the rest of the recipes, you have to buy the book!
April 23, 2024:
Feliç Diada de Sant Jordi! A Little History of the Most Beautiful Book Fair in the World
In Catalonia, April 23rd is the most beautiful day of the year. The feast of Sant Jordi started out in medieval times as the Catalan version of Saint Valentine’s Day. The patron saint of Catalonia was St. George, the dragonslayer. According to this chivalric tale, there was a city—some say it was Montblanc—that was under siege by a terrible fire-eating dragon.
At first it ate their livestock, but then it started demanding human sacrifices. The town drew lots, and the king’s lot was drawn. His daughter, the princess, was to be sacrificed.
King and princess accepted their fate—this is a fairy tale, right?—and the young woman made her way to the rendezvous. Out of nowhere, Sant Jordi appeared, and faced down the fearful dragon.
Now, there are those who say he slew the dragon, and then there are those who say he wounded him and the princess used her girdle as a leash to lead him back to the village, tamed, as Paolo Uccello portrayed them around 1470.
Be that as it may, in the 20th century, when gentlemen were still giving ladies a rose on Sant Jordi’s day, the Publishers’ Guild decided to sell books on the day they sold roses. The book fair started out all over Spain during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, in 1926, commemorating the birth of Cervantes, in October. The Catalan readership, however, found a way to subvert the message, and the books that sold most widely and wildly were those written in Catalan, whose use was severely restricted by the regime).
In 1931, the festival migrated to St. Jordi’s Day, April 23rd, the day on which both Shakespeare and Cervantes died, and as luck and history would have it, it fell a couple of weeks after the historic municipal elections of April 12th which Republican—anti-monarchic—candidates won all over Spain. As this was considered a plebiscite on the monarchy, the king fled the country, incognito.
The first Festival of Books and Roses to be celebrated on St. Jordi’s Day occurred less than two weeks later. Perhaps the impetus of that joyful democratic uprising has something to do with the incredible energy of this day to celebrate love of books. It is no longer a question of a gentleman’s giving a lady a rose, and the lady’s giving the gentleman a book (no question who got the better deal in that arrangement) but now everyone gives everyone a book and/or a rose. In Catalonia, 10% of the books sold all year are sold on St. Jordi’s Day. Not a bad custom to adopt.
We will leave you now with an iconic photo from 1932. We hope to awaken some of the same joy in books in New York that that little fellow is feeling in 1932 Barcelona.
Speaking of New York, and to prove that the legend of Saint George knows no bounds, we would also like to share this wonderful little animated film from a text by Stan Freberg, a comic famous in the 40s and 50s, who riffs on the similarities between Dragnet, the father of all cops-and-robbers TV shows, with its very characteristic sound, accent, and cadence, and “Dragonet,” the dragon: Enjoy St. George and the Dragonet (and watch for the moment when the steed paws the ground—adorable.)
After you have enjoyed this lovely little parody (and the vintage New York accents), please have a look at our program, here.
April 21, 2024:
Happy Sant Jordi week! Saint George the dragonslayer is commemorated on April 23 in Barcelona, the inspiration for the Sant Jordi USA festival, but we like to get a head start as they warm up their engines.
This year, to celebrate the lunar Year of the Dragon, instead of slaying the dragons, Sant Jordi is reconciling with the dragon through love of books and reading.
And we are calling on the dragons of the world to convene! If you have a dragon you love, pleaser share it with us here.
This afternoon at Sant Jordi Chicago, Alta L. Price has organized Constellations of Meanings, revolving around a brilliant new project in literary translation: Best Literary Translations, 2024, an anthology devoted exclusively to literature in translation. What could be better for Sant Jordi USA, a festival devoted to literature in translation, than a partnership with BLT?
Please join Alta L. Price (of ALP Textuality and a translator from German and Italian) as she moderates Constellations of Meanings, a conversation with Noh Anothai (co-editor of Best Literary Translations and translator from Siamese), Izidora Angel, translator from Bulgarian, and Lizzie Davis (editor at Transit Books and translator from Spanish).
Stay tuned for news about Sant Jordi NYC, launching online on Wednesday, April 24th and at Out of the Box Theatrics, 154 Christopher Street in New York, from April 25-27.
Animation by Ziliang Zhan - Casa Batllo
Sant Jordi Presents Best Literary Translations 2024: Constellations of Meanings
with Izidora Angel, Lizzie Davis, and Noh Anothai. They will be joined in conversation by Alta L. Price WATCH IT AGAIN!
Sun. Apr. 21, 3:00–4:30 p.m. CDT at Seminary Co-op
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
Join us for readings from the inaugural volume of this unique anthology, devoted entirely to literature in translation! Hear new stories, get your book signed, and take home a rose. Chicago’s own Third Coast Translators Collective brings work from over 15 different world languages into English—come hear two local translators in conversation with one of the anthology’s co-editors. The selections come from vastly different languages and cultures, and appear here in English for the first time.
Izidora Angel, Lizzie Davis, and Noh Anothai discuss Best Literary Translations 2024. They will be joined in conversation by Alta L. Price. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. Presented in partnership with TCTC.
About the Book: Best Literary Translations 2024 features both contemporary and historical poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages — brought into English by thirty-eight of the most talented translators working today.
Two of the anthology's contributing translators, Izidora Angel and Lizzie Davis, will be in conversation with one of its co-editors, Noh Anothai.
Izidora Angel is a Bulgarian-born writer and literary translator. She was awarded an NEA fellowship for her work featured in the Best Literary Translations anthology.
Lizzie Davis is a writer, an editor, and a translator from Spanish and Italian. Her recent translations include Juan Cárdenas’s novels The Devil of the Provinces (longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature) and Ornamental (finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize).
Noh Anothai is co-editor for Best Literary Translations and also translates out of Thai. Find his most recent work “The Snow Girl” in the January 2024 issue of Asymptote.
Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. A recipient of the Gutekunst Prize, she translates from Italian and German into English.
April 8, 2024:
Sant Jordi USA celebrates the most beautiful book fair in the world, the Sant Jordi Book Festival, in which the legendary promenades of Barcelona and Catalonia fill up with bookstands and flower stalls on April 23rd, the feast of Saint George.
Sant Jordi USA has always had a soft spot for the dragon. We love them all! The fire-breathing, the water-dwelling, the princess-eating and, best of all, the book-reading.
Now, legend has marked Saint George as a dragon slayer, but Sant Jordi USA thinks it’s time for a reconciliation. As you can see in the delightful image above, Sant Jordi USA has brought the dragon and the knight together through the love of books.
This year, to celebrate the lunar Year of the Dragon, Saint George is sending out a call to all the dragons of the world to convene in New York at santjordiusa.org. If you have a favorite dragon or dragon story, from the most fearful predator to the most gentle beast, go to our instagram stories share it, tag @santjordiusa, and we will create a dragons’ gallery. If you don't have instagram, send it by email to santjordiusagallery@gmail.com.
May 1, 2023:
A look back in pictures at the events of this past week in Chicago and New York.
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