The many lives of Mireia: Maria-Antonia Salva's translation of Frederic Mistral's Mireio

This article analyses three different editions of Maria-Antonia Salva's translation of Frederic Mistral's Mireio (1859) in the early years of the Catalan diaspora after the Civil War and in Francoist Spain: Mexico (1946), Majorca (1948), and Barcelona (1959). It investigates the ideological transformations of Mireia as a result of the pressures on Catalan culture throughout time. The paratexts are designed to condition the interpretative framework of Mireia as a text of political and cultural resistance. Whereas the 1948 edition significantly lacks a prologue, the prologues of the other two editions recodify the source text within the contemporary Catalan milieu, metaphorically connecting Catalan and Occitan subalternity. The domestication and recodification of Mireio became an affirmation of Catalan culture and language at a time of severe political repression.