Miquel Cabal Guarro (Barcelona, 1977) has a PhD in Linguistics and is a literary translator from Russian. He is a member of the cooperative L’Afluent.

After finishing secondary school, he decided to study Slavic Philology, a degree he completed with Mention in Classical Philology. He then obtained a grant to study and work with the library and other services of the University of Barcelona. In 2000, in order to complete his tertiary education, he spent the winter and spring months in Moscow and, on his return, began to work in the music bar Heliogàbal and also embarked on his first literary translation, the result of which was the publication in Catalan of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground by Llibres de l’Índex with the title Apunts del subsòl. After this he combined translation, music and various tasks in the catering business and cultural management, although spending increasing amounts of time working as a translator. He has now translated into Catalan authors including Dovlatov, Tsvetaeva, Tolstoy, Platonov and Chekhov. He then began a PhD. Without ceasing his work in literary translation, moved by the reality around him and alarmed by the more scientific forms of philological entelechy, he became interested in sociolinguistics. His doctoral thesis is about the Tatars of Crimea. He left Heliogàbal and, with the rest of the team that worked there, formed L’Afluent, a cultural services cooperative.

Miquel Cabal Guarro is president of the governing board of L’Afluent, a member of the Executive Committee of the Barcelona Culture Council, holds a PhD in Linguistics (University of Barcelona), works with the University Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication (CUSC-UB), and is a member of the Endangered Languages Study Group at the University of Barcelona. He is a member of Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (Association of Catalan Language Writers – AELC) and of the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations (CEATL).



Web page: Toni Terrades for AELC.
Documentation and biography: Miquel Cabal.
Portal photograph from the author’s personal files.
Translated by Julie Wark.