Josep Pla seems to enjoy an almost constant series of presence effects in plays of light and shadows, expressions on faces, turns of phrase, the direction of the wind.Considered one of the most influential Catalan authors of the twentieth century

Josep Pla, The Gray Notebook, NYRB Classics, 2014.

excerpt

Josep Pla’s masterpiece, The Gray Notebook, is one of the most colorful and unusual works in modern literature. In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family, local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn’t; and the long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same unflagging zest and humor.
Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works. It is a beautiful, entrancing, delightful book—at once a distillation of the spirit of youth and the work of a lifetime.

Josep Pla, a budding young writer, was studying law in Barcelona in 1918 when the university was shut down because of the Spanish flu epidemic. Pla returned to his parents’ house in the coastal town of Palafrugell, and with nothing to do he decided to keep a journal in which he would describe—as a way of honing his skills as a writer—everything about the daily life of his family and friends that had any interest for him. The gray notebook in which he kept this journal would survive the Franco regime, when Pla’s native Catalan tongue was suppressed, to emerge, some fifty years later as The Gray Notebook, the most celebrated work of twentieth-century Catalan literature, admired as much for its pitch-perfect prose as for its shrewd observance of the human comedy, the great book of the great city of Barcelona and of life on the beach. The Gray Notebook, full of incident and humor and light, is pure pleasure to read: a glowing Bonnard interior on an epic scale.
The first part of the book, which begins on March 8, 1918, is a story of family life on the Costa Brava and the coming-of-age story of a young man torn between an old-fashioned ideal of a life of quiet dedication to work and family and the intellectual seductions of European culture. Pla’s enthusiasms and uncertainties, friendships and crushes, his reading, the drama and politics and absurdity of family life—we are drawn into all these as we also follow Pla in his wanderings through town, scrutinizing his fellow citizens, or out under the magnificent skies of the still-unspoiled countryside of the coast. In January 1919, Pla returns to Barcelona to complete his studies, and the book’s second part paints a hilariously revealing picture of student life. He learns next to nothing from his teachers, a good deal more from the writers and artists he meets in cafés and salons, and most of all from Barcelona itself, with its night life and ramblas, the city of Gaudi and Modernisme, where just outside the city limits the seemingly timeless life of the country still went on as before.
Combining delightful informality with a perfect clarity of expression and an attention to the detail of day-to-day life that makes it seem anything but banal, The Gray Notebook is both a revelation of its author’s singular sensibility and a universal work of art.

Considered one of the most influential Catalan authors of the twentieth century, [Pla] was born and raised in the Empordà, and over the course of his life wrote over 30,000 pages of prose in which he diligently catalogued the landscape and the life and habits of the people of the region. His complete works, published and republished over the years, contain marvelous descriptive passages that capture the landscape’s history and its complex topography at once.—Words Without Borders

Pla seems to enjoy an almost constant series of presence effects in plays of light and shadows, expressions on faces, turns of phrase, the direction of the wind. His own encounters with presence are what illuminate the communicative potential that the landscape holds, if we approach it the right way.—Romance Quarterly

Born in Palafrugell, Josep Pla was a popular journalist who traveled widely to report on world events. His politics, conservative yet liberal, joined with an ironic skepticism that did not endear him to Catalan leftists and nationalists. Yet by the end of his life he was recognized as the most distinguished prose stylist in Catalan. His devotion to writing is evident in his collected works, which fill forty-six volumes. The Gray Notebook is a diary from 1918–19 that Pla revised over many decades.—World Literature Today
Pla (1897–1981) is considered one of the greatest writers of Catalan language, and this beautiful translation lets English readers glory in the quiet strength of his words.
At age 21, the author decided to change his style of writing—a little less flowery but not quite journalistic—and he began this diary, which begs to be read slowly, calmly and multiple times. At the beginning, he strikes a humble, self-deprecating chord regarding his writing. “If these jottings do escape the flame,” he writes, “perhaps one day a distant relative or curious individual with time on his hands will deign to glance their way.” The first half takes place in the countryside, just north of Barcelona, in 1918. Pla’s law classes in Barcelona have been suspended due to the outbreak of influenza. In the comfort of his family home in Palafrugell or wandering about their farm, he watches, feels, smells and hears all that is beautiful in his Catalonia. The author’s writing is not just about description—that’s too simple a word. He masterfully conveys the actual mushroom-y smell of the earth, the odors, the colors in the egg-yolk sky and the taste of spring in Muscat grapes. His lyrical stories capture the soul of his people: of Gervasi, who blew a conch shell every day to mark dawn, noon and dusk; and of Roldós, the pianist who played Bach at the silent movies. In the second half of the book, the narrative moves to Barcelona as classes resume. Pla chronicles his discovery of the circles of men who talked late into the night, the old defending what is, the young, what ought to be. The author examines boardinghouse life, describes how different shoes squeak and worries if understanding Nietzsche is a step forward or backward.
A classic. Readers who travel to the Costa Brava will truly feel what Pla has written. - Kirkus Reviews

Thanks to a Barcelona bookseller, who intuitively grasped my literary tastes, bent down, and pulled a slightly damaged out-of-print French edition from a dusty bottom shelf, I have discovered the Catalan writer Josep Pla (1897-1981). The book is Le Cahier gris, that is Pascale Bardoulaud’s vivid and enjoyable version of El quadern gris (1966), the magnum opus of Pla’s vast and varied output. (In Catalan, Pla’s Obra Completa, with El quadern gris as its first installment, runs to forty-six volumes.) It’s always better to be late than never: The Gray Notebook deserves to be translated into English as soon as possible and studied as a classic of modern European literature. As far as I can tell, this absorbing and oft-funny tome of 612 finely printed pages otherwise exists only in Spanish, Dutch, and Serbian renderings. Apparently a German translator is about to tackle it. Purportedly a diary, it is much more than that. I have never read a book quite like it.

The impetus for Pla’s project, which he initiated when he was only twenty-one years old, was the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. A little-motivated law student at the time, he found himself relegated to an early and prolonged summer vacation because the University of Barcelona had closed down in accordance with a public health measure. The first diary entry is dated March 8th. Pla has returned home with his brother to live with their parents in Palafrugell, their native village. “I see my brother, who adores playing soccer—although he once broke an arm and then a leg while doing so—only at mealtimes,” begins Pla. “He lives his own life. As for me, I get by as I can. I do not miss Barcelona, even less so the University. Life in the village, with my friends who live here, suits me fine.”

What this disabused avowal already hints at is the birth of a writer—the central theme of the book. Because Pla is forced to flee the Spanish flu (and thus, gladly, his dismal law studies), he can finally give rein to his urge to write. In one early passage, dated April 12th, he reports his father telling him to take his textbooks up to the attic. “Whenever you want to study,” his father suggests, “no one will bother you there.” “After wandering around the whole house for a while,” adds the author, “I ended up climbing the stairs.” But instead of opening his textbooks, Pla contemplates the “gentle, sweet, mellow light” that is coming from the skylight. He then describes the attic, complains about his mother’s omnipresence in the house (“if she could, she would tidy up our feelings” as one puts a messy room back in order), evokes the hilly seaside landscape that he can spot from a window, and finally reflects on his Catholic upbringing. After this auspicious stint of writing, he concludes that the attic is too cold.

Little else will be heard about the attic and the textbooks. Pla thereafter spends most of his time outside. As the days go by, he scrutinizes everyday life in Palafrugell and, when summer comes, that of a nearby sea resort, Calella. He has little if anything to do except pass time with his sidekicks, hang out in cafés, sometimes get drunk (“I’m having lots of difficulties, and it is very unpleasant, trying to recover from a Pernod binge”), sharply observe the comings and goings of villagers, record and often satirize overheard conversations, poke fun at the local bourgeoisie and their facetious manners, read Catalan authors (such as the “affected, violinist-like” Xènius, the theoretician of Noucentisme, a national literary and philosophical movement), recall his childhood and its vicissitudes (the move to the new, chilly house has provoked a sort of permanent existential unease), think hard about the Catalan language (the ongoing grammatical and orthographic codification of which was a current topic), and think even harder about the personal literary style that he envisioned and was in fact already forging—and it differed significantly from the flowery academic idiom that was in vogue.

The idle law student, now a budding writer, thus actually has much to do in Palafrugell, especially as regards the perfecting of a style that was to become one of the finest in Catalan literature. As Pla explains several times in acute critical reaction to his literary elders, simplicity and clarity are his goals. But this is not all. As he rejects the temptations of stylistic ornamentation and seeks the most specific nouns and adjectives for his perceptions, he never neglects irony. It is masterfully applied in countless passages of The Gray Notebook. The epithet “realist,” which is sometimes applied to Pla, is insufficient, at least by American standards. (Hemingway was by one year his exact contemporary.) So witty and subtly intricate are Pla’s precisely crafted objective descriptions that The Gray Notebook is brilliantly chromatic throughout. It is emotionally colorful. It is also richly sensate, for Pla excels at transcribing physical sensations, especially those relating to temperature. The author’s subjectivity is disclosed as often through carefully recorded details from the outside world as through his lively opinions, frank confessions, and sometimes rather brutal self-appraisals.

Pla, who revised and expanded his initial diary manuscript much later in adulthood and first brought it out nearly a half-century after the events recounted, structures the somewhat haphazard contents of a normal diary into narratives on several levels. Because he thinks back on and analyzes his childhood (which already seems remote and forever lost, even though he is sojourning in his hometown at the mere age of twenty-one), the book sketches the broad lines of a coming-of-age novel. Because each entry is dated, the diary self-chronicles a work-in-progress, only later to be entitled The Gray Notebook. For the same reason, the notebook charts Pla’s development as a writer; it is a literary logbook that includes probing passages on creativity, literary innovation, and the author’s Catalan literary heritage. It offers the first chapters of his autobiography, in both anecdotal and intellectual senses of the genre.

The second part of the book traces the author’s return, in January 1919, to Barcelona, where he resumes his law studies but is now convinced that his destiny lies elsewhere. His textbooks have “yellowed,” he admits. “They look like old-fashioned things, like lifeless, useless objects. Things can indeed be ordinary; they can even possess a profound, massive, inherent ordinariness. But in this regard, there is nothing like textbooks.”

Pla’s satirical pen turns to the hypocrisies and pretensions of academic life. In the evenings, he delves into the literary and artistic life of the city. From these descriptions emerges still another narrative, that of Barcelona as an active locus of European modernism. Through these various story lines, which are discarded, then picked up again and set forth, the book displays much less heterogeneity than is commonly found in writer’s journals. And bringing these different narrative strands together on a personal existential level is the deadly flu epidemic, an invisible leitmotiv in the first section. Arguably, the epidemic catalyses Pla’s desire to write in the first place; it provokes him into summing up his young life. All along, he is writing and living intently because his days may be numbered.

Among other curiosities, the notebook comprises an extensive and somewhat unsettling description of Pla’s physical appearance. This passage is ostensibly penned for one “Lola S.,” though it is never sent to her because the author suffers from “an excessive feeling of ridiculousness.” At the same time the diarist speculates on his ethnic origins, noting that his mother’s maiden name, Casadevall, can often be found on lists of Jews burned at the stake during medieval pogroms. However, as Pla boasts to Lola about his seductive handsomeness, he claims that he has no “typical” Jewish nose or neck, let alone the “sad eyes of a begging, beaten dog.” Instead, he has “very lively eyes” and his neck is shaped “like a well-composed melody.” Although he is obviously being self-ironic here and, elsewhere, goes on to ridicule his facial appearance, these few sentences may strike readers as racist. All told, it is not that easy to determine what Pla intends, as irony is superposed on irony. Interestingly, he visited Tel Aviv in 1957, traveling from Marseille on a boat full of homeless Jews. His Les Escales de Llevant (1969) comprises an important eyewitness account of Israel in those days.

Despite the respect that his style and literary sensibility immediately command, some aspects of Pla’s life have disturbed Catalan and Spanish intellectuals. During the Civil War years, and especially in 1938-1939, his stance toward Franco showed political ambiguity, or at best revealed the writer’s survival instincts. Although he hated the Caudillo’s prohibition of the use of Catalan, a law that was strictly enforced during the Second World War and only somewhat mitigated during the 1950s and thereafter, Pla seems to have believed that, despite the dictatorship, democracy would gradually establish itself in Spain. His advocates refer to his “interior exile,” as opposed to the genuine expatriation undertaken by countless Spaniards. Pla was no revolutionary, but instead a conservative skeptic. During the rigorous prohibition of Catalan, he turned to Spanish, writing the well-known Viaje en autobús (1942)—just one example of his passion for getting around by all conceivable means of transportation—and several other books. Throughout his career, he traveled far and wide, and produced an impressive amount of journalism. After Franco’s death in 1975, which was followed by a democratic Constitution in 1978, left-wing Catalan writers held it against Pla for a while that he had initially supported, or at least tolerated, the dictator.

The Gray Notebook is, of course, also a notebook, that is a high-precision laboratory for literary experiments. A splendid instance consists of several long dialogues that take place between two young bourgeois lovers. These dialogues are inserted into the diary as trial runs for what resembles a projected satirical novel. The couple’s conversations—earnest for them, hilarious for us—bring the young man (who, by the way, is a law student) and his fiancée fully to life on the page. Their remarks and perceptions also illustrate telltale aspects of the summer resort beach life that Pla has been investigating with his sharpshooter eyes, perfect-pitch ears, and hypersensitive epidermis. Whether he scrutinizes societal mores as in this case or turns inward and wonders who he is, Pla compels throughout this little-known, formally original Catalan masterpiece. - John Taylor

Josep Pla is the modern Catalan writer most widely admired by his countrymen (okay: and women). It’s disappointing, but hardly surprising, that none of his work has ever been published in English. Some of the reasons for this neglect are obvious: Pla wrote non-fiction rather than fiction, his relative conservatism kept him, to an extent, on the margins of post-Franco Catalan literary and cultural life, dominated by the Left, and, above all, English-language publishers are notoriously hesitant to publish work in translation, regardless of the author’s political leanings or his preferred genre (exceptions are made for an occasional international celebrity). But it is perhaps also that in the United States and other English-speaking countries there is a puritanical streak, a prejudice against simplicity, against the delights of irony: literature must be work. Anything else is a mere entertainment not worth the serious reader’s time.

At least two of the precious few American publishers that bring out translations trumpet their Catalan lists; but until they publish something of Pla’s—anything—these boasts will be little more than hollow rodomontade. 

The first entry of El quadern gris (The gray notebook), Pla’s diary, appears below. The diary has been translated into Spanish, French, and perhaps Serbian, so it isn’t entirely inaccessible to those who don’t read Catalan (one suspects that these translations may well be of little consolation to the vast majority of English speakers, but there’s nothing stopping you from learning to read Catalan; go ahead and give it a shot; you’ll be glad you did).

Josep Pla

8 March 1918

Since there’s so much flu around, they had to shut down the university. Since then, my brother and I have been living at home, in Palafrugell, with our parents. We are two idle students. I see my brother, who is a great fan of playing soccer—even though he has broken an arm and a leg at it—only at mealtimes. He is doing his thing. I don’t miss Barcelona and much less the university. I like life in the village, with the friends I have here.

At dessert time, at lunch, a big dish of burnt cream and a delicious, spongy, golden-brown pound cake with a light sprinkling of powdered sugar appear on the table.

“You know you turn twenty-one today, don’t you?”

Indeed: it would be absurd to argue: I turn twenty-one today. I take a look around. My father is eating in silence, in a state of absolute normality. My mother seems no more agitated than usual. Since only saints’ days are celebrated in this country, the presence of the pound cake and the cream make me wary. I wonder if they were really made to celebrate my birthday or to remind me that the total on the bottom line after the first years is altogether negative, downright paltry. This finishing touch, I think, is so natural. Having children in the form of mystery, of vagueness, must be unpleasant. My frivolity, all the same, is so great that not even the problems of conscience posed by the sweets is enough to keep me from finding the pound cake extraordinarily tasty and the cream literally exquisite. When I help myself to seconds, the indifference becomes visibly greater. Twenty-one!

Family! An odd and complicated thing. . . . 

By mid-afternoon it starts raining—a light, vaporous, steady drizzle. There’s no wind at all. The sky is gray and low. I hear the rain falling on the ground and on the trees in the yard. It makes a muffled and distant sound, like the sea in winter. A cold, bitter March rain. As the day wanes, the sky goes from gray to a gauzy white—pallid, unreal. Above the village, weighing on the tiled roofs, is a heavy silence, a palpable silence. The sound of the falling water spins it out into a indistinct music. I see, wafting above this patter, my obsession of the day: twenty-one years old!

Seeing the rain fall, in the end, makes me drowsy. I don’t know what to do. It’s clear I should study, go over my textbooks, to get these boring law studies out of the way. Not a chance. I may often have trouble resisting the temptation to read papers I find in the street, but in front of this sort of book my curiosity gets put under lock and key. 

I decide to start this diary. I’ll write in it—just to kill time, any which way—whatever occurs to me. My mother is a very tidy woman governed by an obsession with keeping the house in a frosty order. She likes to tear up papers, burn old pieces of junk, sell to the ragman everything that, for her, is of no immediate practical or decorative use. It will be enough, then, if these papers are rescued from her admirable housekeeping virtues. If they aren’t, don’t think, in any case, that there’s anything to be sorry about. . . . - fario-fariobooks.blogspot.com/ 

A long-standing tradition lasting more than 8 centuries, Catalan literature mirrors the political status of Catalonia and its relationship with Spain: according to how history treated this land, Catalan literature either blossomed or suffered badly. For instance, the golden age of Catalan literature was brought to an end in the moment Spain sought after a unified power: the Catalan revolt of 1640 was suppressed, rights were limited in 1714 at the hands of King Philip V and ultimately the Catalan language was banned from schools in the 1760s. This attitude was challenged in the following century, with the birth of a movement which came to be known as “Renaixença catalana” (Catalan Renaissance) in 1877, led by Jacint Verdaguer, Àngel Guimerà and Jocs Florals. By then, political calls for a recognition of Catalan rights had surfaced, and studies on the language had begun and were slowly advancing. It is then, in the late 1910s, that Josep Pla writes his masterpiece.
What he created at the age of 21, his “El quadern gris” (“Grey Notebook” in English) has now become one, if not one of the most, beautiful pages of literature Catalonia has ever seen. Written in 1918 and extending to 1919, this sort of diary recollects impressions, accurate descriptions and critical analysis of whatever happened to be around this young talented lad. From landscapes to people, from the bourgeoise society of the time to townspeople of all kinds. It includes songs, poems or short verses which aren’t usually translated into other languages according to what one can find in a few translated editions. What strikes the most is the ability of such a young writer to depict feelings and sentiments as well as concrete and real-life elements. He carefully tells of the decadent vibe surrounding Barcelona in the 1910s, the last echoes of an anti-revolutionary monarchism and the first wails of Spanish nationalism.
In the following years he travels to other European countries, writes essays and articles for journals describing the fast changes of the time and is ultimately silenced in his Catalan expression by the Spanish nationalist censorship that follows the Civil War of 1936-1939.
“El quadern gris” was published only in 1966: the result of years of censorships but also a clear evidence of the scarce attention the literary circles of Spain had granted local literature. But what is our perspective on this today? As important as it is to find a unified national current for European and world literatures, it is equally important to give credit to local contexts, both politically and in literary perspectives. Creativity cannot be trivialized by criteria that tend to favour one language over another, because each language, and therefore any literature that spurs from it, is worthy of respect and deserves to be studied, told, disclosed and known as such. It is a form of civil battle: one that we can fight by expressing interests in minor languages, dialects and local speeches and the literary works that come from them. - thebrightoldoak.wordpress.com

 

Over the last few years I’ve been thinking about translating and actually translating a classic of contemporary literature, Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook. It has never been translated into English: over a quarter of a million carefully chosen and weighted words drawing on the widest possible range of the Catalan language that Pla writes in. Catalan literature isn’t as widely read as it should be in the Hispanic world or by readers literature anywhere, whether in Catalan or English or Spanish translations. Lovers of modern art have been long familiar with Catalan painters Joan Miró or Salvador Dalí. I hope readers will soon be as at home with Catalan writers of their stature. The translation is in the final stages, so I’ll try to describe issues highlighted by a self-editing session from the past week.

Josep Pla wrote The Gray Notebook as a form of diary in 1918 and 1919 and started it on enforced leave from his Law degree when the University of Barcelona was shut down by an influenza epidemic. He is one of the few great autobiographical writers in the Hispanic literary tradition alongside Santa Teresa de Jesús and Juan Goytisolo. Pla is equally at ease describing the life of the family tortoise, the impact of early readings of Proust, hobos, taverns and fishing villages under changing Costa Brava skies, or satirising priests, professors and politicians, with the insights and humanity of a modern Montaigne. His range of themes, styles and vocabulary is immense, so I’m grateful to Google and Pla scholars but above all to the ten-volume Alcover-Moll Diccionari Català-Valencì-Balear that is great on examples and local words from different parts of the Catalan speaking world backed by illustrations. Some people think print dictionaries are fuddy-duddy. I don’t: they provide respite from the screen and allow for fruitful browsing of the bookish kind.

 Pla revised his opus for first publication in 1966. In my final phase of revision I’m consulting two previous translations when I’m not sure of a nuance. The Spanish translation by poet Dionisio Ridruejo and Gloria de Ros from 1966 in Carles de Casajuana’s 2008 edition and Serge Mestre’s French translation that came out with Gallimard in March this year. Narcís Garolera published a revised version of the Catalan original with over 5000 changes in October 2012, so I have to watch out or those too in case they have implications for the translation. Juggling with heavy tomes is good for the wrist muscles!

I spent one afternoon on an entry. On 29 May, 1918, a chemist by the name of Pere Poch turns up at Pla’s café. He runs a shop but at the age of thirty-five has one outstanding course to pass to get his pharmacy degree. He spends time away from his family trying to get through. Pla ironically suggests that though constant failure depresses Poch, – he runs a good pharmacist’s, so perhaps the qualification isn’t that vital – he actually likes philandering on his ‘pilgrimages’ to different centres of learning across the Peninsula. (Pla doesn’t say Spain, but the Peninsula. The book is littered with references to ‘el país’ that I translate usually as ‘country’. Catalan is a language without a country: Pla’s use of ‘país’ is a political statement.) To return to Poch, the exam failure has exam phobia and struggles to get out of bed on the day of the test:

Una pressió còsmica fortíssima el manté entre els llençols. Pensar en la paraula tècnica i sentir, inerts, tots els ressorts que produeixen la verticalitat li és el mateix.

 I’m looking at my most recent edit:

Intense pressure from the cosmos keeps him between the sheets. The very thought of the word ‘Technology’ kills dead every reflex that brings on verticality.

The only change introduced by Garolera is to remove the capital letter from Tècnica that represents the subject Poch can’t handle: Técnica Física y Farmaceútica – Technology in Physics and Pharmaceutics. The course basically involves describing in words the physical make-up and appearance of apparatus. Poch can handle the real items in practice but can’t paint them in words. A favourite Pla theme is the useless pedantry of pedagogy in peninsular academia.

The language of universities in 1918-1919 is Spanish, so in his many entries related to universities, subject titles are in Spanish and the short exchanges with professors are in Spanish, obviously in an ocean of Catalan. What’s the translator to do? One option would be to leave everything in Spanish and translate into English in footnotes or follow the French tradition of translating into French and adding a double asterisk to point up that in the original is in Spanish. I don’t like either option. Leaving all the Spanish in the text would be to highlight Spanish and footnotes look forbidding. So I translate mostly, sometimes include a key Spanish word, or add that a person is speaking in Spanish. The general issues around Catalan and Spanish can be picked up in the introduction.

Pla uses lots of superlatives that sound strong in Catalan but weak in English when replicated endlessly by ‘most’ or ‘very’ or ‘extremely’, so the translator must ring the changes: will using ‘from the cosmos’ rather than ‘cosmic’ work?

No readers are ever going to doubt that this is a work originally written in Catalan, what a translator doesn’t want them to doubt is that it is astonishingly subtle autobiographical writing, story-telling and comédie humaine sustained over 700 pages. Can it be done in English, at least a good way along the line? If translating is about not effacing, about carrying over literary originality into a new language, in this context, the irony, the second sentence as it stands misses out a level of irony. In the portrait of Poch, Pla uses  ‘ressort’ ironically that ‘reflex’ gets dimly; it’s as if he were a jack-in-the box trapped in his box: his ‘springs’ are paralysed (by fear of an exam about such technical devices) so he can’t get out of bed. The robotic humour is then intensified by the comic use of the abstract ‘verticalitat’. So then the question is: can English stand the use of the cognate ‘verticality’. Does it bring a smile or will the reader groan at the sight of a Latinate monstrosity? It certainly shouldn’t be automatically dismissed as a ‘Romance’ lexical item that Anglo-Saxon English simply can’t accommodate: it deserves its corner for the moment while ‘springs’ and ‘inerts’, (another item with a technological side) are on the scales:

The very thought of the word ‘technology’ jams the springs that should trigger his verticality.

come to mind: ‘kills dead’ must go with ‘reflexes’ and ‘springs’ brought ‘jams’ and ‘trigger’ that combine a snappy rhythm with technological connotation. For the moment, I decide to stick with ‘verticality’ as verbal joke made stronger by the three very physical words just introduced. Also it’s not an isolated sentence and its location in the surrounding entry plays a role that has already suggested two changes:

The mere thought of the word ‘technology’ jams the springs that should trigger verticality.

It’s still a work in progress – just – but final deadline is imminent and final decisions have to be reached and the work is long. Obviously, weighing up choices is time-consuming, though practice and concentration help accelerate the process – as does having an excellent editor. - Peter Bush