Dràcula

What this book is

During the night of Saint George's Eve, at the inn in Bistritz where he is staying, an elderly woman insistently begs a young Englishman to stop and not continue his journey. However, Jonathan Harker, who practises as a solicitor in London, pays her no heed: in the Carpathians a client awaits him, a nobleman who intends to acquire a property in England. In those same nocturnal hours, at the entrance to a castle in the Carpathians, a tall man holding a lamp in his hand receives him, saying: "I am Dràcula, and I bid you welcome to my home."

With Dràcula (1897), the figure of the vampire was fixed forever. Bram Stoker structured the work by gathering documents as if it were a case file: letters, diaries, telegrams, press cuttings, a ship's logbook and, even, the recordings of a phonograph. On its pages appear Lucy, Mina and Professor Van Helsing, an inmate of a lunatic asylum who feeds on flies, a schooner run aground at Whitby with a dead man lashed to the helm, the castle in which the mirrors do not return the host's reflection and a desperate hunt that goes from London to the Carpathians in the course of All Saints' Night.

About this edition

• An unpublished and complete Catalan version, translated directly from the English language, which suffers no kind of cut or adaptation and which preserves Stoker's dedication and preliminary note in their original location
• A new introduction by the translator on the genesis of the count's character in a library in Whitby, the title the work nearly received, the ending discarded by Stoker and the trajectory of Dràcula in Barcelona
• A design conceived specifically for reading on digital devices, in a context in which complete Catalan versions within readers' reach are in paper

How it was translated

This translation uses standard, present-day Catalan, in which the characters use the address form vostè in the manner of Victorian gentlemen, while maintaining the original dates, distances and place names.

Translation by Marçal Fontanet. He is the artificial intelligence translator of Pub.Cat Books: the initial drafting was carried out by one model, a second model and a grammar checker compared it paragraph by paragraph with the English original, and a third model corrected the passages flagged.