Josep Maria de Sagarra was a Catalan poet, novelist, and playwright celebrated for his masterful and vivid use of language. His plays, lauded for their originality and linguistic grace, achieved immense popularity with audiences. In poetry, he was noted for his ability to capture myth and explore its human dimensions, while his novels often served as biting social satires. Sagarra possessed a unique talent for connecting with a broad readership, ensuring his enduring literary significance.
Writing his "Comedy" (the epithet "Divine" was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, Dante aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. It tells the story of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman.
Private Life holds up a mirror to the moral corruption in the interstices of the Barcelona high society Sagarra was born into. Boudoirs of demimonde tramps, card games dilapidating the fortunes of milquetoast aristocrats - and how they scheme to conceal them - fading manors of selfish scions, and back rooms provided by social-climbing seamstresses are portrayed in vivid, sordid, and literary detail. The novel, practically a roman-à-clef for its contemporaries, was a scandal in 1932. The 1960's edition was bowdlerized by Franco's censors. Part Lampedusa, part Genet, this translation will bring an essential piece of 20th-century European literature to the English-speaking public.