Jacobé and Fineta by Catalan writer Joaquim Ruyra (tr. Alan Yates, and published by Fum d’Estampa, 2022) are two short stories from early in the twentieth century, originally gathered in a collection of stories pertaining to the sea.

Jacobé, the longer of the tales, is told by unnamed narrator as he recalls the eponymous girl who used to be his nanny, her burgeoning beauty and eventual decline to illness. Fineta, another young woman, experiences both the pleasures and dangers of solitude as she waits for her family to return from a fishing trip.

These are both enjoyable stories, the prose carrying an exciting abundance of nature into its similes and metaphors, capturing the world in all its beauty and destruction and, in trying to make sense of the world, hinting at greater cosmic unknowns.