Final Judgements. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Final Judgements

The pinnacle of Fuster’s essay writing, Final Judgements is a book of aphorisms that, used to teach moral and/or philosophical truths, reveal things that are relevant to the universal human experience. As Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker puts it, “the aphorism is, in its algebraic abbreviation, a micro-model of empirical inquiry.” And Fuster uses the aphoristic tradition, less to establish truths than to undermine them, to question the conceits contained in the established truism. Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, however, this book is laugh-out-loud funny, Fuster’s wit revealing that the best aphorisms are based in stripping language of its artifice and revealing its contradictions, and the cumulative effect is a quintessentially Mediterranean kind of playfulness.

Joan Fuster (1922-1992) was a highly influential poet, critic and thinker who wrote in both Catalan and Spanish. Born in Sueca, a village near Valencia, he grew up in a middle-class Catholic family and graduated with a law degree from the Universitat de València in 1947. Renowned for his irony, and his concise, incisive style of writing, Fuster is best known as an essayist and left-wing thinker who championed Catalan language and culture in Francoist Spain. Among his most celebrated books are Nosaltres els valencians (1962), Diccionari per a ociosos (1964), and Final Judgements (1960). Mary Ann Newman (1951) is a translator from Catalan and Spanish into English. A graduate in Hispanic literatures of New York University, she has become one of the foremost voices on Catalan culture in the English-speaking world. She has translated fiction by Quim Monzó and Josep Maria de Sagarra, essay by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, and poetry by Josep Carner. Newman was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1998, the J.B. Cendrós International Award from Òmnium Cultural and the North American Catalan Society Award for Scholarship in 2016.