ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the cultural issues preoccupying the publishing industry and related professions and explores politicization of literature. It begins by looking at the role of translation in stabilizing Catalan culture during the transition, and focuses on the controversy surrounding literary criticism, or the lack of it, in Catalan. The chapter discusses two key debates which preoccupy novelists and/or critics even today: does there exist in Catalonia a novelistic 'Generation of the 70s'?; and, could there be said to exist a 'novel of the Transition'? It attempts to assess the significance of translation into Catalan in the cultural climate of the 1970s and '80s. If, as is the case in the long tradition of Catalanist thinking, it is generally accepted that 'cultura i identitat era i es una mateixa cosa', then the strength of that culture becomes a marker of the validity of the nation's claim to a separate identity.
