ABSTRACT
One of the most admired twentieth-century authors in the Catalan language, Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) lived in Barcelona throughout the Spanish Civil War. Her best-known novel, La plaça del Diamant [In Diamond Square], has attracted more readers than any other Catalan novel both within Spain and throughout the world (Carbonell 5).1 The year of its publication, 1962, marked the beginnings of a political liberalization forced on the Franco regime by its failed economic policies that resulted in easing its prohibition of the Catalan language, outlawed since the Nationalist victory in 1939. In this context, Rodoreda’s novel became a symbol of Catalan literature “emerging from the dark” (Eaude). A half-century later, there were translations of La Plaça del Diamant into more than thirty languages. Neus Carbonell contends that Rodoreda’s female protagonist reects not only the history of Catalonia but more broadly “les angoixes existencials pròpies de la societat europea del segle XX” (12) [the existential anguish typical of twentieth-century European society].2
