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Reviewed by:
  • Lo Nou Testament
  • Johannes Kabatek
Lo Nou Testament. Traducció de Josep Melcior Prat. Transcripció a cura d'Antoni Coll i Casals. Notes de Pere Casanellas i Bassols. Estudi introductori de Pau Alegre i Nadal, Carme Capó i Fuster, Antoni Coll i Casals, Pere Casanellas i Bassols. Glossari d'Antoni Coll i Casals, Pere Casanellas i Bassols. Revisat per Albert Rossich. Corpus Biblicum Catalanicum, 38. Barcelona: Associació Bíblica de Catalunya, Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat. 2008. clxxxiv + 433 pp. ISBN 978-84-8415-948-3.

The nineteenth century is not only the century in which a large number of formerly spoken European vernaculars – including such that could count on an earlier written although interrupted tradition – are elaborated in writing, but it is also a century marked by the intensification of Bible translations and worldwide distribution of Christian texts in many languages. The first tendency is strongly related to the mindset of the eighteenth century and can in part be interpreted as a counter-reaction to the uniformist linguistic and cultural tendencies that spread throughout the world with the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The latter tendency, also related to the Enlightenment, has its centre of gravity in the British Bible movement at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the foundation of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804, whose aim it was to make the text of the Bible accessible to as many people in the world as possible, by preference in their respective native tongue. A later continuation of this activity can be observed from the 1850s onwards, with a more linguistic and less religious motivation, when Louis Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's intellectual nephew, publishes versions of the Gospel According to Matthew in London in many European languages and dialects, as a comparative basis for linguistic description.

The Catalan New Testament published in the present edition by the Catalan Bible Society as nr. 38 of the Corpus Biblicum Catalanicum is another good example for this connection: translated in England by a Catalan politician and intellectual in exile during the 1820s as a commissioned work for the British and Foreign Bible Society, it was first published in London in 1832, with subsequent editions in Barcelona and Madrid. It is the second volume published in the Corpus series, following the publication of a part of a fourteenth-century Catalan Bible. The number 38 is accounted for by the project's aims of publishing a comprehensive corpus of Catalan Bibles from the fourteenth to the twentieth century.

José Melchior Prat's translation is the first extensive Catalan prose text in the nineteenth century, published at the beginning of the so-called Catalan Renaixença, the literary emancipation of Catalan that took place from the 1830s, and this is what makes it particularly important for the history of the Ausbau of written Catalan. The translator's task was not only to reproduce the text of the New Testament in another language but also to create a new discourse tradition in that language, with the help merely of some basic referential works such as Joseph Pau Ballot's Gramatica y apología de la Llengua Cathalana, published in 1814, and the trilingual Catalan-Spanish-Latin dictionary by Joaquim Esteve, Josep Bellvitges and Antoni Jutglà (1803–1805).

This creation drew on the collaboration of another Catalan, Ramon Bussanya, who lived in exile in the small Yorkshire town of Knaresborough during the 1820s, as did Prat, and on revisions and comments by various other Catalans from different regions (p. LXX). Thus, the aim of the translation was not only to create a dialect translation but also to contribute to the creation of a kind of Catalan koiné. However, this objective was only partially achieved, due to the rather marginal position of these texts in the Catalan of the nineteenth century, and because of a certain dependence on the models that served as a basis for the translation: supposedly, the Catalan version was based directly on the Vulgata, but in fact six other versions were additional sources for the text (the Spanish versions by Cipriano de Valera from 1602, by Felipe Scío...

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