The historian and translator Núria Sales (Barcelona, 1933-2023) passed away this Sunday at the age of 90. Daughter of the editors Joan Sales and Núria Folch, and mother of the editor Maria Bohigas, she was considered one of the innovators of the modern history of Catalonia, a discipline in which she had been a disciple of Jaume Vicens Vives and Pierre Vilar.
Sales was born in Barcelona, but she had to go into exile in 1939, first to France –where her father, an officer in the Republican army, would join them–, and with the German occupation they emigrated first to the Dominican Republic and later to Mexico, like herself. he related in a brief autobiography to the Club Editor website, the editorial first of his parents and now of his daughter.
They returned to Barcelona in 1948, where, already as a historian – a career she studied independently – in 1962 she published Història dels mossos d'esquadra. The previous year, however, she had already published her only book of poems, Exili a Playamuertos, which had won the Màrius Torres prize for poetry. Married to the nuclear physicist Oriol Bohigas Martí, they settled in Paris, where she received a doctorate in History from the Sorbonne, but after several articles she relegated research to the eighties.
It was in that decade when he returned to publishing, first collaborating on the History of the Catalan Countries coordinated by Albert Balcells, and later with Els botiflers, 1705-1715 (1981), among other books, as well as his important contribution to the History of Catalonia from Pierre Vilar with the volume dedicated to The centuries of decadence (XVI-XVIII), with unpublished perspectives. She was also a professor at Pompeu Fabra University and a member of the Academy of Good Letters.
Throughout her life, she also worked as a literary translator, especially from French and English, of authors such as Skou-Hansen, Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Goldstyn, Willa Cather and Jane Austen, as well as Història de dues ciutats by Charles Dickens, its author. favorite. In this case, during her confinement, she polished it to publish it on the internet in daily installments edited by her daughter and illustrated by her granddaughter Aina Bonet, and which ended up becoming a book in November 2020.
In 2018, on the other hand, Sales gave his father's archive to the Mercè Rodoreda Foundation, of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, formed by a profuse correspondence with some of the great writers in Catalan of the past century, such as Llorenç Villalonga or Xavier Benguerel, and especially Rodoreda, as well as numerous documentation, both about his novel Incerta glòria, and about the years of exile and return.
The farewell ceremony will be this Tuesday at 11 o'clock at the Collserola funeral home in Barcelona.
