El monjo

What this book is

Madrid: a church is packed to the rafters. The whole city has come to hear the preaching of Ambrosio, the abbot of the Capuchins, raised within the walls of the monastery and held by all to be a saint. Pride, however, is an open door, and someone has been watching at it for some time. The moment a young and mysterious novice reveals a secret to him, a descent begins that will lead him from the cell to the crypts, from sin to crime and, in the end, to the prisons of the Inquisition.

Alongside Ambrosio's plot unfolds that of Doña Agnes and her lover Raymond, marked by an escape that ends badly, a German castle, the spectre of the Bleeding Nun and the buried secrets hidden by a convent.

Considered one of the great Gothic novels of European literature, El monjo (1796) was written by Matthew Gregory Lewis at the age of nineteen. The impact of the work, both for its success and for the scandal it unleashed, accompanied the author throughout his life with the nickname «Monk» Lewis.

This is a novel aimed at adult readers that shows, with the harshness of the original text, episodes of violence (including sexual violence), crimes, supernatural terror and a very harsh anticlerical satire.

About this edition

• A new, complete Catalan translation, rendered directly from the English from the full text, without the cuts of the 1798 edition and without watering down any passage
• We have not located any other version published in Catalan, whether in print or in electronic format
• An unpublished prologue by the translator on the furore the work aroused, the mutilated Spanish edition of 1822 and various curious aspects of the text, such as the Tirant lo Blanc camouflaged among its pages
• A brief content warning placed at the start of the prologue

How it was translated

This version renders the text into standard, contemporary Catalan that keeps the use of vós in the dialogues between nobles and religious figures in order to reproduce the tone of the late eighteenth century, while translating the poetic passages into verse.

Translation by Marçal Fontanet, the artificial intelligence translator at Pub.Cat Books. The working process consisted of an initial draft by one model, a subsequent paragraph by paragraph review against the English original by a second model and a proofreader, and the final correction of the passages flagged by a third model.