La llegenda de Sleepy Hollow

What this book is

In Sleepy Hollow, a Dutch valley on the edge of the Hudson where everyone believes in ghosts, Ichabod Crane works as a schoolmaster. He is a tall, awkward, gluttonous and superstitious man who has set himself a goal: to marry Katrina Van Tassel, the heiress of the richest farmer in the region. The drawback is Brom Bones, a strong, boastful young bachelor fond of heavy jokes who is also trying to court her. Even so, the main obstacle walks at night along the valley paths: the spectre of a headless soldier who rides towards the cemetery looking for him.

Washington Irving's most famous piece and the starting point of the Headless Horseman is La llegenda de Sleepy Hollow (1820). It is a horror story that works at the same time as a comedy: a text of ironic spirit, full of food, music and village gossip, whose outcome the reader must decipher for themselves. Ideal for an October night, it is read in a single sitting.

About this edition

• An unpublished and complete Catalan version, translated directly from the English without any cuts or adaptation: this is not a children's read
• A new introductory study by the translator that explores the origin of the tale, the fictional character of the historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, the real places of the Hudson Valley and the way in which this autumn story became a classic Halloween reference
• The whole work by Irving, accompanied by the opening poem, the reflections interspersed by the narrator and the final note that is usually removed in practically all adaptations

How it was translated

This translation is expressed in standard, contemporary Catalan that preserves the mocking tone of the narrator, while keeping the names, the miles and the yards of the original text.

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