From La Mancha to Stockholm

La Mancha to Stockholm is one of the European Union's longer drives, at 3308km, but in 2021 they will be adjacent on Legenda's shelves:

At the sunburned end, we are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Speaking Prose: The Power of the Voice in Cervantes by B. W. Ife. This is volume 50 in our Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures series. Our late and much-missed series edior Trevor Dadson always said that Sir Barry's new monograph would be a fine title to bring up the half-century, and we're happy to see that coming together. The cover is a Gustave Doré illustration — I hadn't realised quite how profusely Doré illustrated Cervantes, with 120 plates and 257 vignettes: a far sight more than the 20 at Wikimedia Commons. (Barry, who prefers to put his trust in physical copies, owns a copy of the edition Doré worked on: Louis Viardot's 1863 translation of DQ into French. Viardot, it turns out, learned Spanish after marying an opera singer, and... but that is another story.)

It seems appropriate to be travelling north when turning to today's other new title, Affective Spaces: Migration in Scandinavian and German Transnational Narratives by Anja Tröger, which is a study of the experience of migration to Scandinavia — often considered Europe's most contented region, even if there aren't quite so many windmills. Anja's book is volume 24 in our Germanic Literatures series, which, as the "-ic" signals, is very much a series covering not just all flavours of German but also Danish, Swedish and Norwegian written culture.

It's a pleasure here to thank the artist Sara Kristina Davies, who worked with us on the cover of the book. The image is a detail from her remarkable projection work Pine Bleeding, which she began in 2018, and which represents her own experience of diaspora. Like a migrant novelist writing about home but in the language of her new country, Sara uses photographs of her new country to evoke her origins. About Pine Bleeding in particular, she writes:

The artwork is exploring my Anglo-Swedish diasporic experience. The imagery is made in response to my longing for the traditional Swedish red painted cottage and the Falu-red paint more generally. The photographs are composite images from many locations in the north of England and Wales. They are visualising memories from my former home in Sweden. Pine forests, birch groves, wooden houses and lilac bushes, they explore the texture of the the idyllic traditional cottage environment. The only thing that cannot easily be found in the UK is the Falu-red paint. It is what is lost.

For more of her work, see: https://sarakristinadavies.wordpress.com