Published: 04/05/2023
ISBN: 9781783788255
Granta Books
208 pages

When I Sing, Mountains Dance

Irene Solà

Translated by Mara Faye Lethem

When Domenec – mountain-dweller, father, poet, dreamer – dies suddenly, struck by lightning, he leaves behind two small children, Mia and Hilari, to grow up wild among the looming summits of the Pyrenees and the ghosts of the Spanish civil war.

But then Hilari dies too, and his sister is forced to face life’s struggles and joys alone. As the years tumble by, the inhabitants of the mountain – human, animal and other – come together in a chorus of voices to bear witness to the sorrows of one family, and to the savage beauty of the landscape. This remarkable English-language debut is lyrical, mythical, elemental, and ferociously imaginative.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance made me swoon. Translated with great musicality and wit, it is rich and ranging, shimmering with human and non-human life, the living and the dead, in our time and deep time; a fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny and profoundly moving

Max Porter

There's so much beauty in this wonderful polyphonic novel. Each page makes you fall in love again with nature, with imagination, with words, with life. When I Sing, Mountains Dance is timeless and unique

Mariana Enríquez

Like nothing I've read before. This novel is a feral, yowling love howl to a place of such staggering majesty that it resists usual comprehension. By giving voice to animals, storms, outcasts, one-legged girls, birthing women, and the mountain itself, Solà pushes past the limits of human experience to tell a story of instinct and earth-time that is irresistible in its jagged glory.

C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold

The Author

Irene Solà is a Catalan writer and artist, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, the Documenta Prize for first novels, the Llibres Anagrama Prize, and the Amadeu Oller Poetry Prize. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery.

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The Translator

Mara Faye Lethem is a writer, researcher, and literary translator. Winner of the inaugural 2022 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award for Max Besora’s The Adventures and Misadventures of Joan Orpí, she was also recently awarded the 2022 Joan Baptiste Cendrós International Prize for her contributions to Catalan literature. Her translation of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. Her forthcoming translations include Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart (Faber & Faber and FSG), Alana S. Portero’s Bad Habit (HarperVia), Max Besora’s The Fake Muse, and Irene Solà’s I Gave You Eyes And You Looked Toward Darkness.

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