The Sant Jordi NYC Festival of Books & Roses is bringing the Catalan celebration to America.
Feliç Sant Jordi! The Catalan holiday, rooted in the story of the region’s patron saint, is celebrated every year around Catalonia, but is coming to NYC this week. The Sant Jordi NYC Festival of Books & Roses is a celebration of international books and culture inspired by the Catalan holiday, with events in New York and online. Mary Ann Newman, a Catalan translator and the director of Sant Jordi NYC, has turned the festival into an extravaganza this year, featuring in person and digital readings, conversations, a West Village street festival and more. The entire calendar of events is here.
Sant Jordi Day is a celebration more book lovers should get into — my colleague Drew wrote a lovely ode to the holiday last year, making the case that it’s the less-commercial, more literary alternative to Valentine’s Day. It’s a day to exchange books and roses with your sweetie, and celebrate literature from around the world.
The yearly celebration of Diada de Sant Jordi in Catalonia started centuries ago as a rose exchange — legend says that a rose bush bloomed from dragon’s blood spilled by Sant Jordi (Saint George to Anglophones), Catalonia’s patron saint. Gifts of books came later, Mary Ann Newman told PEN America:
Sant Jordi started in the 15th or 16th century, but in the 1920s, the Catalan Booksellers Association and the Barcelona Booksellers Guild decided to mix books into the rose festival, held on April 23rd, which is now International Book Day. It was so successful that, now, ten percent of all the books sold in Catalonia are sold on Sant Jordi.
Mary Ann, along with the Catalan Institute of America and the PEN America Translation Committee, started organizing lit crawls in celebration of the holiday in 2014, taking groups of readers and writers from bookstore to bookstore to celebrate Sant Jordi’s Day and work in translation.
Since then, the festival has grown and morphed, and this year they’ve found a home in the West Village: “on April 26th, we’re going to close down Christopher Street and have book stalls and food and beverage tastings. Books, roses, and food!”
In addition, there will be readings and discussion over the next few days about Latin American literature, Catalan women writers, the European canon, and more. This international celebration is part book festival, part cultural exchange, and Mary Ann has a broader goal of helping to slay the dragon of publishing’s monolingualism:
In international publishing, English is the great monster. Every other language translates from English, but English doesn’t necessarily translate from the other languages. One of the things we’ve discovered in doing Sant Jordi over the years is that, if we are giving a platform in English for the literatures of the world, we’re kind of countering that role of English as the three hundred-pound gorilla.
If you want to help slay that dragon like Sant Jordi of myth, why not borrow from Catalonia and gift a book in translation to a friend or loved one?
The Sant Jordi NYC Festival of Books & Roses starts today and runs through Saturday — see you there!
