Valencian Folktales: Enric Valor

Enric Valor is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. This selection of his highly popular rondalles (folk tales) will for the first time introduce his work to an English-speaking audience. At a time when Catalan was under threat from the cultural bulldozer of the Franco regime, which condemned the use of anything but Castilian Spanish in public communication, Valor went to great lengths to disseminate knowledge of the language, through writing grammars and linguistic studies, as well as teaching it to fellow inmates when he was imprisoned by the regime for his cultural activities. These tales, collected over a number of years in small villages in the province of Alacant, were a significant part of his ongoing efforts to safeguard the Valencian language and the culture and history of the region. The Rondalles Valencianes have been compared to Italo Calvino’s Italian Folk Tales and Henri Pourrat’s Treasury of French Folk Tales. Like them, Valor aimed in rewriting the oral material to establish a common national body of folk narratives and to make the stories more appealing to Valencian readers, young and old alike. The critical Introduction provides an outline of the author’s life and an overview of his work as novelist, grammarian and folklorist, as well as an assessment of the tales which identifies their place within the broader European folklore tradition.

Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer (retired) in American literature at the Universitat de València. He has published three collections of essays in English and has co-authored a number of bilingual (English-Spanish) critical editions of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams and Sarah Orne Jewett. He is co-editor of Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (Rodopi 2007) and is also one of the co-editors of The Companion to Richard Berengarten (Shearsman 2016) and Managing The Manager: Critical Essays on Richard Berengarten’s Book-length Poem (Cambridge Scholars 2019).With Miguel Teruel, he has translated Berengarten’s Black Light into Spanish (JPM Ediciones 2012) and with Viorica Patea, has translated eight books by Romanian poet Ana Blandiana into English (My Native Land A4, Bloodaxe 2014; The Sun of Hereafter & Ebb of the Senses, Bloodaxe 2017; Five Books, Bloodaxe 2021). A further volume of Blandiana’s poetry is slated for publication by Bloodaxe in 2024. His critical essays, translations and poems have appeared in many print and electronic journals in both Europe and the US.

Maria-Lluïsa Gea-Valor is a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the Universitat de València. Her research interests lie in the fields of genre analysis, written academic discourse, and literary translation. She has specialized in evaluative and promotional genres such as the blurb and the book review. Her work has been published in prestigious journals in her field such as Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of English for Specific Purposes, and Ibérica, as well as in the volumes Academic Evaluation: Review Genres in University Settings (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), Constructing Interpersonality: Multiple Perspectives on Written Academic Discourse (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres (John Benjamins 2014), among others. She has co-edited several books on applied linguistics, corpus linguistics and translation, and has recently co-authored the book A Practical Introduction to English Phonology (PUV 2012).