Ulises inmigrante: salas subirat, sus orígenes catalanes, su argentinidad incómoda

The biography of José Salas Subirat, the enigmatic first translator into Spanish of James Joyce’s Ulysses, is one of the most unusual in the literary world of Argentina. Born to Catalan parents and brought up on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, he was a self-made intellectual with links to left-wing circles in the 1920s, an occasional and vocational lesser writer, who had a career in business. In 1945 he produced a surprisingly vivid and daring translation which, seventy years later, mustering an equal number of admirers and detractors, leaves nobody indifferent. His immigrant origins are an essential key to the language –neither entirely Argentinian, nor entirely peninsular Spanish, nor entirely international– that characterizes his major work of translation. The aim of this article is to give an account of his Ulises in the light of the translator’s Catalan roots and to discuss his literary monument as the gauge of a particular state of the language —post-immigration Rioplatense Spanish.