The historian and translator Núria Sales (Barcelona, ??1933-2023) died this Sunday at the age of 90. Daughter of the publishers Joan Sales and Núria Folch, and mother of the publisher Maria Bohigas, she was considered one of the innovators of modern Catalan history, a discipline in which she had been a disciple of Jaume Vicens Vives and Pierre Vilar.
Sales had been born in Barcelona, ??but he had to go into exile in 1939, first to France – where his father, an officer in the republican army – would join them, and with the German occupation they first emigrated to the Dominican Republic and later in Mexico, as she herself related in a short autobiography on the website of Club Editor, the publishing house first of the parents and now of the daughter.
They returned in 1948 to Barcelona, ??where, already as a historian – a career she studied for free – she published Història dels mossos d’esquadra in 1962. The previous year, however, he had already published his only book of poems, Exili a Playamuertos, which had won the Màrius Torres prize for poetry. Married to the nuclear physicist Oriol Bohigas Martí, they settled in Paris, where she obtained a doctorate in History at the Sorbonne, but after several articles she relegated research until the 1980s.
It was in that decade when he published again, first collaborating on the History of the Catalan Countries coordinated by Albert Balcells, and later with Els botiflers, 1705-1715 (1981), among other books, as well as his important contribution to the History of Catalonia by Pierre Vilar with the volume dedicated to The centuries of decadence (XVI-XVIII), with unpublished perspectives. She was also a professor at Pompeu Fabra University and a member of the Academy of Good Letters.
Throughout her life she also worked as a literary translator, mainly of French and English, of authors such as Skou-Hansen, Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Goldstyn, Willa Cather or Jane Austen, as well as Charles Dickens’ History of Two Cities, the your favorite author. In this case, it was during the confinement due to covid that he polished it to publish it in daily installments on the internet edited by his daughter and illustrated by his granddaughter Aina Bonet, and which ended up becoming a book in November 2020.
In 2018, on the other hand, Sales ceded his father’s archive to the Fundació Mercè Rodoreda, of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, formed by a profuse correspondence with some of the great writers in Catalan of the 20th century, such as Llorenç Villalonga or Xavier Benguerel, and especially Rodoreda, in addition to numerous documentation, both about his novel Incerta glòria, and about the years of exile and return.
The farewell ceremony will be this Tuesday at 11 am at the funeral home of Collserola in Barcelona.
