Francisco García Tortosa

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.

[1][2] 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».

[3] 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.

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).

[4] 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.

[...] 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».

[11] 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».

[12] 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.

[16] 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».