Walking through the World Republic of Letters: The Narrative Practice of Maria-Mercè Marçal

This chapter applies an innovative translational lens to reading pioneering Catalan-speaking lesbian feminist poet and theorist Maria-Mercè Marçal's only novel. In the process it sheds light on how the novel parades the author's self-consciously performative and embodied practice, linking this to previous writings and to Marçal's own reflections on translation to and from Catalan. The essay reveals the ethical and aesthetic power of Marçal's pioneering novel as a model for renegotiating and rewor(l)ding world literature from the margins, never settling for the illusory comforts of identification, but attending to, articulating and celebrating the multiple traces of difference, the elusive pleasures --and pain -- of singularity.