# Francisco García Tortosa

Francisco García Tortosa (born in La Ñora (Murcia, Spain) on September 15, 1937, died in Seville (Andalucía, Spain) on May 19, 2024) was a Spanish University Professor, literary critic, and translator into Spanish. In Spain García Tortosa is considered one of the chief experts on the figure and work of the Irish writer, James Joyce, whose creations he has translated and about which he has published a wide range of studies. The Irish hispanist, Ian Gibson, has called García Tortosa «Spain's leading expert on Joyce», while considering his translation of Ulysses, in collaboration with María Luisa Venegas, as «prodigious».

## Biography

His primary school in La Ñora, Murcia, was located in a barrack hut which had been used as an Air Force outpost during the Spanish Civil War. The school was run by the Jesuits who occupied the town's Monasterio de los Jerónimos (Monastery of Saint Jerome). He studied as a high school pupil in the town of Cehegín and in Murcia's "Alfonso X el Sabio" High.
Subsequently, he studied at the University of Salamanca, being awarded his Degree in Modern Philology in 1965. In 1970 he obtained his Ph.D. under the tutorship of Carlos Clavería Lizana, Member of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua, while it was in Salamanca that García Tortosa defended his Doctoral Thesis entitled Los viajes imaginarios en el siglo XVIII inglés y su fondo cultural (Imaginary Journeys in the English Eighteenth Century and their Cultural Background). His research work, between 1964 and 1968, was undertaken in the Reading Room of the British Museum, later to become the British Library, and the results were published in book form by the Publications Service of the University of Salamanca.
Also between 1964 and 1968 he was Reader in Spanish at Kingston College, London, and at the University of Leeds.
He was Full-Tenure Lecturer and Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela between 1973 and 1976, and Professor at the University of Sevilla between 1976 and 2008, where subsequently he became Professor Emeritus between 2008 and 2011.
A large number of his publications up until 2002, at least those related to Joyce, are listed in the book edited by Alberto Lázaro and Antonio R. de Toro Santos, entitled James Joyce in Spain, A Critical Bibliography, 1972-2002 (Publications Service, University of La Coruña, 2002).
He has given key lectures and taught Courses in most of Spain's universities, as well as in institutions such as the Juan March Foundation and the City of Culture of Galicia, in Santiago de Compostela. European universities and institutions in which he has given key lectures and Courses include University College, Dublin, the James Joyce Centre, Dublin, as well as others in Antwerp, Zürich, Monaco, etc. In the United States he has lectured in the University of North Carolina, Oregon University, and Northwestern University, at Evanston, Chicago, amongst others.
During his career, Professor García Tortosa has supervised 32 Ph.D. Theses, many of them dealing with Joyce. He has also held the following posts: Secretary of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Director of the University of Sevilla's Institute of Languages, Dean of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Sevilla. Likewise he was Founder and Treasurer of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, as well as co-founder and director of the journal Philologia Hispalensis. In 1992 he founded the Spanish James Joyce Society, of which he is life-time President, and, in 1993, the Association's journal, Papers on Joyce, was also founded by him, acting in collaboration with other academic professionals belonging to Spanish universities.
Moreover, he has been guest writer in the cultural supplements of newspapers such as El País, El Mundo, and ABC.
García Tortosa was divorced and has three children.
Francisco García Tortosa died in Sevilla the 19th of May, 2024, being 86 years old.

## Works

There are three main strands which run through García Tortosa's professional work: his lecturing and teaching, his literary criticism, and his work as a translator. Both the latter are largely centred on the figure and works of James Joyce, as well as on Joyce's relations with Spain. In this regard, Rafael I. García-León, co-editor of the webpage Iberjoyce, writing in the issue of the journal Papers on Joyce published in honour of García Tortosa (Festschrift) wrote the following: «Next, we find Francisco García Tortosa's article "España en Joyce". [...] Definitely [...] is a landmark in the study of the influence of Spain in Joyce's works, since he gathers the ideas and conclusions presented in former articles».
Moreover, in the words of the editors of this same issue of Papers on Joyce (Carmelo Medina Casado, Antonio Raúl de Toro Santos, Alberto Lázaro Lafuente, and Jefferey Simons), García Tortosa «has been a pioneer of English studies in Spain for more than four decades; he has worked as hard as everyone to establish and strengthen these studies in our country». «It is, however, in postgraduate and Ph. D. studies that his work has left its most impressive legacy».
As far as his dedication to Joyce is concerned: «In the narrower ambit of our field of study, Joyce's studies in Spain cannot be understood without reference to García Tortosa. [...] he has been a seminal influence in the field».
Finally, García Tortosa «[...] was the first to see the significance of genetic criticism to translation. [...] His translations of Ulysses and "Anna Livia Plurabelle" make it possible for Joyce's works to reach the Spanish-speaking literary circle, as well as readers in general».
Meanwhile, Javier Aparicio Maydeu, Professor at Pompeu Fabra University, on the edition of Ulysses, undertaken by García Tortosa, and issued by the publishing house Cátedra: «It is irrefutable that thanks to García Tortosa's rigorous edition, at last an accessible and affordable Ulysses, commented on with finesse and well contextualized, is available to Spanish readers, and thus there is no doubting that we have reasons to celebrate».
Likewise, the poet and essayist, Jenaro Talens, contrasting it with José Salas Subirat's, underlines the following regarding this translation: «Philological rigour, and a capacity to find effective solutions, is perhaps one of its key virtues, together with its keen determination to transplant the musical skeleton of the work as a whole to a language, which is Spanish, distanced as it is from the syncopated rhythm of English. It is for this reason perhaps that this translation will stand as a point of reference for a long time to come».

## García Tortosa on Joyce

In an interview, the scholar had this to say about the Irish writer: «The difficulty with Joyce lies in how one needs to be highly realistic. If you meet someone in the street, that person does not open himself up completely to you. Little by little, in subsequent encounters, that person will start to reveal himself. And even so he will show himself to you in a limited and contradictory way. Thus it occurs in the works of Joyce». In keeping with this, elsewhere García Tortosa maintains that the attitude the reader should adopt when faced with reading those same works needs to be similar to that which he adopts when faced with life.
Regarding the task of translating Joyce: «Translating Ulysses constitutes an out-and-out odyssey; not only do the problems that crop up need to be solved, but the translator is required to possess an encyclopaedic knowledge, not to mention a command of vocabulary related to the most varied facets of Art, Philosophy, and the Applied Sciences. Nevertheless, the greatest difficulty lies in configuring a text from which stems the same hints, echoes and ambiguities as in the original. [...] So that a translation does not betray its original source, amongst other things and to the extent it is possible, it should avoid being explicative, it ought to maintain the ambiguity and the obscure passages just as they are found in the source text. In a novel like Ulysses the translator is continually seized by the temptation to facilitate the reading process, however, in doing so, we would be distorting the author's intentions».
Yet, in recent times, García Tortosa's main interest has been centred on Finnegans Wake, as shown by the number of publications which, over the years, he has dedicated to this controversial work, the difficulty surrounding which, the scholar himself states, is the result of how, in many ways, has to do with it being a continuation of the earlier novel; its technique «is nothing more than the natural evolution of that which was employed in the "Circe" episode in Ulysses».