Author: Claude Potts
Fum d’Estampa Press
![Fum d'Estampa Press](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/COLOPHONBLACK-234x300.png)
“Our objective is to bring what we think are great stories and literature to the English-speaking world and let the readers decide for themselves.” – Douglas Suttle
Fum d’Estampa Press was founded in 2020 by translator Douglas Suttle to bring exciting, different Catalan language literature to an English speaking audience. Though small, the press quickly established itself as an ambitious publisher of high quality titles. Since then, they have been long- and short-listed for some of the most important literary prizes in the UK and abroad, and have recently started to publish fantastic literature in translation from languages other than Catalan.
Catalan authors include Montserrat Roig, Joan Fuster, Guillem Viladot, Jordi Cussà, Bel Olid, Joaquim Ruyra, Jacint Verdaguer, Laura Alcoba, Maica Rafecas, Jordi Larios, Almudena Sánchez, Adrià Pujol, Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà, Raül Garrigasait, Oriol Quintana, Joan Maragall, Jordi Llavina, Marina Porras, Jordi Graupera, Llorenç Villalonga, Jaume Subirana, Ferran Soldevila, Narcís Oller, and Rosa Maria Arquimbau.
Among the translators are Alan Yates, Ronald Puppo, Louise Johnson and Peter Bush, Tiago Miller, and Mara Faye Lethem.
While its editorial offices are based in Vilafranca del Penedès, south of Barcelona, it prints its books in the south of England, and stores its physical books in Scotland. Ebooks are also available.
Here are a few of their books held by the UC Berkeley Library:
Correspondance complète de Rousseau ONLINE
![Jean-Jacques Rousseau](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/rousseau.png)
In partnership with the Voltaire Foundation, the Correspondance complète de Rousseau ONLINE makes Ralph Leigh’s critical edition in 52 volumes in the original French-language available as an ebook collection for the first time. The digital corpus gathers together all 8,000 letters written to and by one of the most important figures of eighteenth-century intellectual history, as well as the correspondence between third parties relating to the writer and his time. Drafts and copies have been collated against the original manuscripts and all variants reproduced. The extensive annotations identify individuals, events and places, explain the linguistic usages of the eighteenth century, give bibliographical information and clarify obscure allusions.
This library purchase was made possible with the generous support from the Archie & Harriett Maclean Endowed Fund for French Culture.
Col·lecció Breus from the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)
The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) makes available the transcripts of debates, lectures, seminars, and symposia given by luminaries from both sides of the Atlantic over the years. Here are a few of these printed lectures, now published as bilingual pamphlets by Editorial Breus, now in the UC Berkeley Library collection:
98. La literatura y la música son parte de mí / Literature and music are part of me – Julieta Venegas
96. El món que necessitem / The World we need – Donna Haraway – Marta Segarra
92. Arrautza, ou, huevo, oeuf, egg / Arrautza, ou, huevo, oeuf, egg – Bernardo Atxaga
91. La revolució avui / Revolution today – Angela Davis
81. El viejo futuro de la democracia / Democracy´s old future – Pedro Olalla
67. L’habitació, la casa, el carrer / Room, House, Street – Marta Segarra
63. La ciutat del dissens. Espai comú i pluralitat / The City of Dissent: Shared Space and Plurality – Xavier Antich
58. L’È́tica de láutoestima i el nou esperit del capitalisme / The Ethics of Self-esteem and the New Spirit of Capitalism – Josep Maria Ruiz Simón
49. De Cartago a Chiapas: crónica intempestiva / From Carthage to Chiapas: An Untimely Chronicle – Juan Villoro
46. Com si Déu no existís / Come se Dio non ci fosse – Paolo Flores d’Arcais
44. Estado de excepción y genealogía del poder / The State of Exception and the Genealogy of Power – Giorgio Agamben
40. Violència d’Estat, guerra, resitència / State Violence, War, Resistance – Judith Butler
35. Artesanos de la belleza de la propia vida / Crafters of the Beauty of Life Itself – Ángel Gabilondo
32. L’ambigüitat de la puresa / The Ambiguity of Purity – Lluís Duch
30. L’amistat / On Friendship – Jordi Llovet
18. Las lógicas del delirio / Logics of Delusion – Remo Bodei
View all publications in the CCC series on the publisher’s website.
Mapping the Italian Language(s) — The Atlante Linguistico Italiano
With its tenth volume recently added to the UC Berkeley Library, the Atlante Linguistico Italiano is a unique piece of the Library’s map collections. Each entry in the atlas begins with a single concept, notion or phrase in standard Italian such as cuore, heart. Accompanying this is a map of the Italian peninsula (along with Sicily and Sardinia) that contains the equivalent term, rendered in IPA, as heard in communes all across the country. The lexical and phonetic variations of a single word play out in gradients across the landscape with small changes from one commune to the next that give way to seismic ones from one region to another. The result is a condensed roadmap of the immense linguistic diversity of Italy.
As of now, the ten available volumes cover lexical items in the following spheres: the human body, clothing, the home, food, family, and society, with many other spheres such as fauna, commerce, and agriculture yet to be published. While this work is comprehensive in its treatment of geographic variants, it says unfortunately very little about diastratic variation or the relative social capital of the varieties it contains. With its data now over 30 years old, and many of its constituent dialects likely under the threat of extinction, the Atlante may soon start to take on historic and diachronic intrigue as well.
![Oggi](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/oggi-768x1024.png)
And if you’re thinking of taking these volumes home with you, think twice. They won’t fit in your backpack. They are big and heavy, measuring 49 x 71 centimeters each, and best consulted in the comfort of the Main Stacks.
Pellis, Ugo, and L. (Lorenzo) Massobrio. Atlante linguistico italiano / materiali raccolti da U. Pellis [and others] ; redatto da L. Massobrio [and others]. Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1995.
Main (Gardner) Stacks fff PC1711 .A89 1995 v.1-10
Review of Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Peter Neil Carroll. Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. ALBA Special Edition. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2024.
Scholar and poet Peter Carroll may be best known for his historical works on the Spanish Civil War and the 2,800 Americans who served in it. Building on The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (1994) and From Guernica to Human Rights: Essays on the Spanish Civil War (2015), this new collection of poems is a tribute to those volunteers known as Lincolns. Longshoremen, sailors, teachers, students, novelists, poets, nurses, doctors, barbers, carpenters, florists, truck drivers, plummers, salesmen, tailors, artists, cabbies, musicians, and factory workers of all types joined the International Brigades to stop fascism from spreading in Europe. Men and women alike, Jews, African Americans, Asian Americans from virtually all fifty states united in a common cause to liberate the democratically elected Republic of Spain from a fascist uprising led by General Francisco Franco and the neighboring dictators who propped him up—Hitler and Mussolini. Through a lyrical collage of archival sources and blank verse, Carroll has assembled a poignant testimonial of those Americans he knew who enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln and Washington battalions of the International Brigades, more commonly referred to as the Lincoln Brigade after the war.
The Lincolns or brigadistas were united by the choice they made to risk it all crossing the Atlantic for an uncertain fate. The deceased, the survivors, and even the deserters get equal page space in Carroll’s kaleidoscope homage. But not all are typical heroes in these non-fiction poems. The first is dedicated to the fragmented unknown soldier:
Does it matter who he is
or why he’s smiling, what he read?
he was there,
Spain 1937
in ill-fitting trousers and shirt,
fighting fascists,
anonymous, immortal.
Other poems are dedicated to those who became known for their personal uniqueness, or the unique path they took to get to Spain. Many of these volunteers were first-generation children of immigrants from big cities, and small towns. One Lincoln was the son of an Ohio governor while another actually ran for governor of California in 1946. Among the better known is the charismatic Berkeley graduate student Robert Merriman—son of a lumberjack—and his wife Marion, who arrived from California via a research fellowship in Moscow. Novelist, journalist, and screenwriter Alvah Bessie was one of the “Hollywood 10” and appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 where he refused to talk, and became “a minor star mingling with the left elite.” Another who rubbed shoulders with Ernest Hemingway—one of the most renowned chroniclers of the war—was a working class Jew from Brooklyn named Milton Wolff, who began as a machine gunner and was quickly promoted to battalion commander before returning home with the rest of the international volunteers in December 1938.
The war in Spain brought dignity to those discriminated against at home because of the color of their skin, such as Crawford Morgan:
In Spain I felt like a human being, a man.
People didn’t look at me with hatred in
their eyes because I was black, it is quite
a nice feeling to feel like a human being.
Or Salaria Kea:
She stood out, the one African American
woman in the Spanish Civil War, a nurse who
spoke her mind, fought racism, saved lives.
Carroll’s poems, rarely more than a page, are structured around both known and little known facts which defined these volunteers, many whom Carroll was able to interview himself when they were alive. Nearly all joined the Communist party—a prerequisite of the Comintern’s recruitment and a decision which would follow the survivors back to the United States. Many Lincolns were persecuted, blacklisted, imprisoned, or driven to suicide or exile by their own government during the McCarthy era. Carroll’s verses locate the humanity in those volunteers who had broken and turned against the cause. Edward Barsky, on the other hand, was among so many like Bessie and others who paid a high price for refusing to name names:
[…] He went to prison—
six months and a fine. Now a felon, he
lost his New York medical license but
what else could a good doctor do?
Whether they died in Spain, in the next World War, or in the U.S. most dedicated their lives to the struggle, taking up similar causes along the way. Carroll’s poems document how they found meaning and relevance in new fights against totalitarianism, racism, and anti-semitism in the 20th century. While many re-enlisted and served proudly in World War II, others protested American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as American covert operations in Cuba, Chile, and Central America.
Peter Carroll’s Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is an accessible testament and representation of extraordinarily moving individuals who put their lives on the line to change the world. They recognized the high stakes at play in Spain, which so many Americans realized too late, as World War II would come to prove.
Claude Potts is the Librarian for Romance Language Collections at the University of California, Berkeley where he is also part of a cross-departmental team working to install on the campus a plaque honoring Spanish Civil War volunteer Robert H. Merriman. This review also appeared in H-Spain.
Celebrating Black History Month in the Romance Languages
Contemporary Black, African, and African diaspora writers across the world are redefining literature and criticism in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Here are some noteworthy books in their original languages recently acquired by the UC Berkeley Library. Translations into English may also be available for some of the better known.
Mélio Tinga
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Léonora Miano
Cristina Roldão et al.
David Pullins
Aïssa Maïga et al.
Doris Wieser & Jessica Falconi, orgs
Léonora Miano
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
Alain Mabanckou, Pascal Blanchard, et Abdourahman Waberi
Evelyne Trouillot
Dimitry Elias Léger
Tierno Monénembo
Djaïli Amadou Amal
Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry
Igiaba Scego
Pierre Singaravélou
Carlos Martens Bilongo
Dorothy Odartey-Wellington, ed.
Camilla Hawthorne
Inocência Mata et al., eds.
Please also see the related English literatures post for Black History Month 2024 and the Black History at Cal library research guide.
Il Tolomeo: rivista di studi postcoloniali
Hard to imagine the UC Berkeley Library as one that may soon not be able to afford new journal subscriptions but for better for worse, that’s where we are heading with serials reduction projects such as the one we undertook last year. It’s a good thing thing the open access movement is still gaining traction. It’s also a good thing universities like the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice are boldly choosing to publish their journals and some of their books this way.
Il Tolomeo: rivista di studi postcoloniali first saw the light of day in 1995, thanks to the work of a group of postcolonial scholars at Ca’ Foscari. The journal publishes peer-reviewed articles, reviews, interviews, and previously unpublished original contributions in the fields of francophone, anglophone and lusophone literatures. It investigates the postcolonial literary phenomenon in all its manifestations, but is particularly interested in contributions which take a comparative, interdisciplinary approach: dialogues between literature and the arts, investigations of hybrid forms such as comic strips and cinema, research which links literary studies with the social sciences, or innovative approaches such as digital and environmental humanities.
For its next issue, Il Tolomeo invites all interested scholars to send their contributions for the upcoming 2024 issue (no. 26). The issue will be divided into a generalist section (on any theme) and a thematic section dedicated to asylum, refugees and postcolonial literatures. The deadline for submitting complete contributions is May 20, 2024.
Revamped Guides for French/Francophone and Italian Literatures
A recent overhaul of the two literary research guides for French and Francophone Literatures and Italian Literature & Criticism first created quite a long time ago will improve navigation and discovery in these vast print collections. Over the course of the past year, we have critically reviewed the former guides, weeded outdated resources, and replaced them with more current content with links to digital resources when available.
These two literature research guides are now benefiting from the LibGuides platform, which makes it much easier to revise than the former PDFs. Each guide is structured by sections for article databases, general guides and literary histories, reference tools, poetry, theater & performance, and literary periods. They interface seamlessly with related guides published by the UC Berkeley Library. For example, on the home page of each LibGuide, there is a prominent link to the lists of recently acquired publications in both French and Italian, making it even easier to stay current on new books in any particular call number range.
Because the guides are much easier to update, they encourage user interaction and invite community suggestions for inclusion (or deletion).
If you have time over the winter break, please take a whirl and let us know what you think. We’ll be unveiling a similar guide for Iberian Literatures & Criticism this spring!
Celebrating more than 150 years of World Languages at Berkeley
![banner + campanile](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/banners-1024x534.jpg)
New banners celebrate 150+ years of Berkeley’s prominence in teaching world languages
At least 60 languages — from Mongolian and Old Norse to Polish, Catalan, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic and Biblical Hebrew — are taught at UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s top institutions for the breadth and depth of its world languages program. A growing emphasis also is being placed at Berkeley on revitalizing and preserving endangered languages, most of them spoken by Indigenous peoples.
To help honor more than 150 years of global languages at Berkeley, 63 colorful banners will begin flying throughout campus today, and for the next 18 months, that feature facts about the campus’s language programs, as well as 21 bilingual and multilingual faculty members, students and alumni.
Among the messages on the banners:
- Collectively, undergraduates at UC Berkeley speak more than 220 different first languages.
- More than 500 language learning classes are taught at Berkeley annually.
- More than 6,000 Berkeley students enroll in those classes each year.
- In 1872, the first endowed chair in the UC system was created — for the study of East Asian languages at Berkeley.
- Students at all UC campuses can take online African language classes at Berkeley, which is well-known for Amharic, Igbo and Swahili instruction.
Reposted from Berkeley Letters & Science 10/25/23
See also: https://artshumanities.berkeley.edu/celebration-world-languages-uc-berkeley
Robert H. Merriman Plaque online kick-off event 10/3/23
![photo](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/merriman2.png)
Please join us in celebrating the memory of the UC Berkeley graduate student in economics, who gave his life fighting fascism in Spain as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Remembering Robert H. Merriman (1908-1938):
From Berkeley to the Trenches of the Spanish Civil War
Tuesday, October 3, 2023
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM Pacific (PST)
Online event (registration required)
The University of Barcelona’s DIDPATRI research group has offered UCB a second casting of the commemorative plaque that stands today in the village where it is believed that Merriman was held and then executed by the fascists. We are launching a fundraiser to cover the costs of its installation at the center of campus near Memorial Glade, which honors UC Berkeley veterans of World War II.
This memorial will contribute to the educational mission of the University as a readily accessible stop for campus tours, as well as a relatable point of reference for interdisciplinary classes touching on twentieth century history. Its location near The Bancroft Library, where the Bay Area Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Post Records are archived, will also call attention to the research opportunities available there. These records were donated by Merriman’s widow, Marion Merriman Wachtel, who accompanied him in Spain where she was also a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Project sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley.
For more information or to make a donation, please visit ucblib.link/robert-merriman.