Llorenç Villalonga once said that The Dolls’ Room was “the portrait, or, if you wish, the poem of Mallorca. Of a certain Mallorca, that is: mine.” What many agree to be the author’s most compelling work was published in both Catalan and Spanish, but essentially belongs to the island, if to anyone, as both languages do.
Villalonga was bilingual, and there is no doubt that when the novel was in the making, the political barrier between the two languages was a bitter one indeed, with Franco imposing Spanish over the other languages spoken in Spain. Villalonga lived and wrote crossing that line. In addition, he was never a careful stylist; his focus was primarily on theme, on character, and on atmosphere, evoking a lost world. Probably most of his editors in both languages were amused by the author’s self-portrait in Don Toni de Bearn when he confides in Joan Mayol, “You will naturally find some oversights in my style and perhaps a few grammatical liberties and transgressions. Be careful when you correct them, Son. […] I have at times had to sacrifice grammar and morals in exchange for accuracy.” Although his lack of formal education in Catalan may have shown in his writing, the dialect spoken in Mallorca was his mother tongue, and, as the language his characters would actually have spoken, enabled him to develop a broad range of subtle registers; it was also better equipped to convey the natural and cultural setting for The Dolls’ Room. Villalonga’s Spanish, on the other hand, was articulate but somewhat stiff and self-conscious, with the occasional expression borrowed from Catalan.
Villalonga, a man who moved between different worlds and languages, also chose a double title for his novel: Bearn, or The Dolls’ Room, including both the name of the fictional estate that encapsulates the lost world of Mallorcan rural aristocracy and that of the locked room integral to the novel’s plot. While English editions of the novel have used only the second half of its title, in Catalan and Spanish the novel is available as Bearn o la sala de les nines and Bearn o la sala de las muñecas, respectively, and is generally referred to simply as Bearn.
The question as to which version of this novel—the Catalan or the Spanish—was “the original,” is, however, complicated and controversial, and Villalonga was careful to cover his tracks. The first complete manuscript was published in Spanish in 1956, although a first draft seems to have been attempted in Catalan; regardless of which the original language was, the version I chose for my translation in 1986 was the Catalan edition published by Edicions 62, conscientiously edited in conjunction with the author by Josep Antoni Grimalt.
It is likely that Villalonga himself, as mischievous as Don Toni de Bearn, created a maze in which he could watch editors, critics, and translators quarrel in search for a simple explanation. In an interview published shortly after his death, he went so far as to claim that the novel had actually been transcribed from Hebrew, then translated into English, from English to French, and finally into Spanish and Catalan. He found his own form of rebellion against the forces that threatened to pull his work to one side or the other of the politically charged line between the two languages. He wanted The Dolls’ Room to stand alone, and I certainly believe it is more than capable of holding its ground outside of Mallorca, Catalonia, and Spain.