Talk with Joaquín Fernández-Valdés, translator of 'War and Peace' into Spanish

In collaboration with the Master in Literary Translation and ACE Traductores, the Culture Program organizes a talk with Joaquín Fernández-Valdés, translator into Spanish of War and Peace, by Lev N. Tolstoy

As part of the International Book Day activities, the Culture Program of the UPF Barcelona School of Management organizes a talk with Joaquín Fernández-Valdés, translator into Spanish of War and Peace, by Lev N. Tolstoy. This session, co-organized with the Master in Literary and Audiovisual Translation and ACE Traductores, will be streamed and will provide an insight into the work of Fernández-Valdés, as well as an opportunity to learn more about Russian literature regarding his latest translation for Alba Editorial. 

Moderated by Ana Mata, director of the Master in Literary and Audiovisual Translation, Fernández-Valdés will talk with Helena Aguilà Ruzola, vice-president of ACE Traductores, about his translation into Spanish of Tolstoy's masterpiece in which he has been working for the last four years. "It has been an exhausting job, a huge challenge", says the translator, who is also the author of the prologue in which he traces the origin of the Russian writer. 

For four years, Fernández-Valdés has worked in the first completely renewed translation of War and Peace into Spanish in the last 40 years

Fernández-Valdés, a literary translator from Russian and English, graduated in Slavic Philology from the University of Barcelona and received a scholarship from Moscow State University (MGU) to further his studies. Among other authors, he has translated works by Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Arkady Babchenko, Aleksandr Luria and poetry by Oleg Chukhontsev and Lev Losev. Likewise, in 2011 he received a special mention for the jury in the «La literatura rusa en España» award for his translation of Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. 

Tolstoy's Legacy

The version published by Alba Editorial, the first completely renewed translation of War and Peace into Spanish in the last 40 years, shows that the work of Tolstoy is still today a literary and moral reference. Like Shakespeare or Cervantes, Tolstoy is one of those classics that represents a tradition and a culture, showing in works such as War and Peace or Ana Karenina a society halfway between modernity and penury. 

Although Tolstoy, with an extremely realistic style and great social criticism, maintains a tendency to long and endless sentences, Fernández-Valdés manages to make the reading flow, also in Spanish. 

The writer Stefan Zweig said that reading Tolstoy was like looking at the real world through a window. Next Monday, April 19, we will look through the window opened by Joaquín Fernández-Valdés and his translation to see and understand the world of Tolstoy. 

You can follow the session at 6pm (CET) at this link