Traduccions/Translations

I remember, many years ago, the day they talked about Casablanca on Qué grande es el cine. One of those panelists who smoked and talked about cinema with passion and knowledge explained that Casablanca is a film that has no genre: there is love, intrigue, politics, adventures, humor. It's impossible to say what it's about, because it's about everything.

Saying what Translations is about is also very difficult because it's also about everything. It tries to respond to the inexplicable substitution of Gaelic for English in recent Irish history. It reflects on the role and value of education. It investigates the destruction of the rural world - wild, pure, and cultured - to make way for the efficiency - aseptic, monolingual, and commercial - of the empire. It tells us the impossible love story between a colonizer and a colonized. It subtly and authoritatively addresses the relationship between language and identity and landscape. And perhaps above all, it explains how members of a community confront major changes. Here lies, possibly, the greatest greatness of Translations: without patronizing and without taking sides, it tells us how people experience decisive moments with profound empathy and enormous humanity.

It's hard to understand why in Catalonia a play that speaks so directly to us, Catalans, had not yet been staged; perhaps the play was waiting for a moment of political intensity and agitation like the one we are experiencing to be represented. I don't know. Because in reality, Translations doesn't try to convince of anything and leaves more questions than answers in the air. Whatever the case, it is an honor and a pride to have directed it with the complicity and dedication of the formidable team of actors who represent it; I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we have enjoyed preparing it.

Ferran Utzet