Travel in Translation: Julio Camba and Josep Pla Write for a Home Audience

Abstract

This part focuses on the travel texts of Julio Camba and Josep Pla, writers from opposite sides of the Iberian Peninsula, who wrote the city for professional reasons. The works of Camba and Pla present curious cases regarding translation and the city given the fact that they both are from regions in which Spanish is not the sole language, they both traveled extensively, and both have at least one entire book dedicated to New York City. In drawing associations between the two writers, as well as between the travel writer and the translator, this part outlines what they were they able to give their readers beyond another description of the cityscape. As Camba's and Pla's New York experience and their resulting texts strikingly marked the timeline of their work, this part argues for travel as an event that sharpens and broadens the creative imagination of writers as well as for a more robust reading of travel narratives as complex texts that carry within them aspects of the city that exceed the visual.