The Transplant

He had been happy for sixty years. Barcelona undid him in four months.

Daniel bakes bread in a village where everyone greets him by name. He is stout, cheerful, comfortably off, and he has never in his life seen a city.

When his son opens a barber's shop on the Rambla and brings the old man to Barcelona for the opening, Daniel is overwhelmed by it: gaslight on wet stone, trams and carriages, crowds that never thin, and a banquet where journalist after journalist rises to toast the civilizing power of a haircut. He goes home to find his own village dark, silent and unendurable. At sixty, he leases out the bakery and moves to the city to spend what is left of his life among people.

It does not go as he expects.

The Transplanted first appeared in 1879 in Croquis del natural, Narcís Oller's first book in Catalan, more than a decade before La febre d'or made him the novelist of Barcelona's boom. The critics who received that first collection believed they had found the writer Catalan literature had been waiting for, and this is the story that shows why. It is an unsparing piece of work about loneliness inside a crowd, about the distance between a father's devotion and a busy son's attention, and about what a city takes from someone who arrives too late to belong to it.

Oller wrote it in his early thirties, and the eye that would later anatomize a stock-market mania is already fully formed here, in the sly comedy of the press dinner and in the silence of a man walking a foreign street with no one to greet.

A new translation into plain modern English, with a note on the choices behind it.