Josep Maria de Sagarra’s Lexical Creativity: the Case of La Divina Comèdia

Abstract

This paper studies the neologisms coined by Josep Maria de Sagarra in his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, published between 1947 and 1951. The article combs through La Divina Comèdia translated by Sagarra and lists the words (a total of 113) that cannot be found in the leading dictionaries of the Catalan language. Out of the 113 words that do not appear in the dictionaries, it is argued that 96 are neologisms coined by Sagarra in his translation. The remaining words are either orthographic variants or words that have been previously used by other writers, even though they do not appear in the dictionaries. The article classifies Sagarra’s neologisms according to the processes of word formation, basically composition and derivation. Within derivation one device Segarra often used is suffixation, a process for which a detailed typology is given by categorising the phenomena into different subgroups. The article also quantifies the frequency with which each of the mechanisms to create neologisms was used. The conclusions posit two possible reasons for Sagarra’s lexical creativity.