“They were still days when I wasn’t like I wanted to be but I wanted to be like I believed I could become, or at least that’s what I kept telling everyone” says Manu, the polarizing protagonist of Enrico Remmert’s “The War of the Murazzi”. Excerpted in Asymptote’s Summer 2023 issue, the story tracks the city of Turin as its identity shifts from Italian homogeneity to a hub of immigration during the 1990’s—a multicultural turn rendered both joyful and sinister in Manu’s cloven gaze, in which the hypocritical impulses towards political optimism and casual violence are mapped from the level of the individual onto that of society in a riveting character study. In an award-winning English translation, Antonella Lettieri preserves Remmert’s literary pyrotechnics and the layers of complexity in his unreliable narrator’s voice.
I had the distinct pleasure of corresponding with Lettieri via email: our conversation ranged from the differentiation of ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’ in the act of translation to the tensions between humanism, cynicism, and so much more that ripple under the surface of Remmert’s text.
Willem Marx (WM): In a recently published book review, you write that one of the joys of literature in translation is “imagining the book that was and the books that could have been”. I’m struck by the way you center the role of imagination. How does imagination play into your translation practice?
Antonella Lettieri (AL): Every time I read literature in translation I cannot help but wonder about the original, whether I speak the source language or not; I’m sure this is a very common experience, but for me it is always a great source of enjoyment. This was particularly true in the case of the book I was reviewing: Thirsty Sea (translated by Clarissa Botsford and published by Héloïse Press), which poses a great challenge to the translator because of its ample use of wordplay and double meanings—as the brilliant Clarissa explains in her interesting translator’s note.
When it comes to translation, I find that ‘creativity’ is perhaps a more useful notion than ‘imagination.’ Reading always requires a creative effort (it is an act of co-creation with the author) and I think that this is even more the case for the kind of close reading required of translators. If we start to understand both reading and translating as acts of creation, perhaps we can put behind us fraught notions of loyalty and fidelity, and start realising that re-reading and re-translating are key efforts in keeping a text alive over time.
WM: As you observe in your own translator’s note, The War of the Murazzi‘s protagonist, Manu, evinces a deep ambivalence when it comes to Italy’s growing multiculturalism. There’s an idealism to her drug-fueled revelations about humanity, which open the story, only for a decidedly sadistic impulse to break through at the end. This is only an excerpt, but I was left with a feeling of tragedy and cynicism. How do you come away from the story? Do you see cynicism in Remmert’s depiction of the other in Italian society?
AL: I believe that “The War of the Murazzi” brilliantly captures a period of time in Italy when immigration was still very much a recent phenomenon, and many people—especially young people—idealistically and naively thought that being accepting of immigration was enough, that integration would simply just happen. Having accepted multiculturalism on a surface level, their own biases and prejudices were often left unquestioned and unresolved. As it turns out, meaning well is certainly not enough to build a fairer society for everyone; on the contrary, it risks making you complicit in ugly, ugly actions.
This plays out later in the story when Nenne accuses Manu of being racist, a charge that Manu vehemently rejects. Whilst she repeatedly interrogates her feelings, including her attraction to violence, it is my impression that she always falls somewhat short of fully grasping the sense of the tragic events unfolding in front of her. Indeed, this is the thread that links all the stories in Remmert’s collection (which takes its title from this story): the characters find themselves faced with history in the form of immigration, riots, and nuclear catastrophes, yet they all fail to grasp—at least to some extent—the full meaning of those very events. Nevertheless, the author always portrays their shortcomings with kindness since, after all, failing to fully understand the other might just be the most human experience of all.
I know that the excerpt ends on a very bleak note, and the rest of the story has plenty more in store for the reader, but I definitely don’t think that Remmert’s depiction of the other is cynical. The story and the collection go much deeper than that, interrogating with profound awareness characters who appear to be mostly unaware. This complexity, which unfortunately cannot be fully conveyed in an excerpt, is exactly why I’m pitching this book with so much passion to publishers. I do hope that the full collection will be acquired soon so that English-language readers will have the chance to probe in full the depths of Remmert’s prose.
WM: The first paragraph of “The War of the Murazzi” takes place in the present, but then the narrative slips into an anthropological history of Turin’s Murazzi. Manu is compulsive in naming the details of a street scene, singling out trees and tram tracks. To what extent is Remmert drawing attention to the way temporal and geographical facts can construct an identity? How do these facts integrate into the overall narrative?
AL: The idea that “to know a place you need to know its ghosts” is one of the key themes of the short story and, more broadly, the entire collection. So, Remmert uses a wealth of temporal and geographical facts to really help immerse the reader into a very specific setting that is most likely unfamiliar, giving them the impression of knowing exactly what Manu is talking about. I, for one, have never been to Turin in my life and yet, having spent so much time in Manu’s company, I cannot shake the feeling of having an intimate knowledge of that city. Moreover, this level of temporal and geographical precision also allows the author to create an incredibly believable and compelling voice, a real piece of bravura on Remmert’s part.
WM: Because “The War of the Murazzi” is essentially written in the form of a monologue, we spend an enormous amount of time with Manu’s voice—and she has a strong awareness of her audience, which comes through in frequent comments directed to the reader. A few of these moments gave me the disconcerting feeling of being mistaken for someone else or of having another identity projected onto me by Manu. I’m curious about how you experienced this aspect of the story initially. More specifically, how did you approach the question of who Manu is speaking to, who her audience is?
AL: It’s very interesting that you ask this question. I had exactly the opposite experience, I suspect merely because of biographical facts. Initially, the thing that drew me most towards this story was that I was able to recognise, in Manu’s experience of being a student in Turin in the late nineties, so much of my own experience of being a student in Bologna in the early noughties. (Though this doesn’t come through so much in the excerpt, it becomes more important later in the story.) Bar her fascination for violence, which always repulsed me, I felt that our experiences were incredibly similar.
So, for me, the process of reading and understanding the story was perhaps the opposite of your experience. Initially, I felt very attracted to this character and perceived a sort of kinship with her; it was only when I started translating her words that I actually began to see in plain sight all her contradictions and prejudices. I even went through a phase of doubting myself for having chosen this project: who would want to read about such a disagreeable character, especially given the way she comes across in the first few pages? It took me some more reading and translating to finally come to terms with her ambivalence and, even more importantly, to draw a clear line between my experience and hers. I suspect that the “feeling of being mistaken for someone else” might actually be a very powerful tool when it comes to reading and understanding this story. I felt that Manu was speaking precisely to me and that muddied the waters. A reader who feels “mistaken for someone else” might actually have a much easier time when it comes to seeing where the real story is.
WM: The process of extricating yourself from a text must lead to a very clear-eyed view of the story. Did this initial experience of recognition inspire you to translate “The War of the Murazzi”? In general, what guides your decision to translate an author or a story?
AL: For me the quality of the writing comes first, closely followed by the interest I have in the story and its themes. After that, of course, come considerations on rights, marketability, sales, and so on. “The War of the Murazzi”—and the rest of the collection—was my first ‘serious’ project, and I think that this experience of recognition definitely helped me take the plunge; I felt that I understood Manu’s voice and that I would know how to render it. Now, I’m working on other projects where the sense of recognition is not quite as strong—though I’m still in love with the writing—and I’m really enjoying the challenge of stepping into other voices and points of view.
WM: Since you translate into both English and Italian, can you describe how your relationship with each language differs? Does your translation practice vary depending on the source language?
AL: I’m not sure if or how my translation practice varies depending on the source language. Behind the specifics of the language, there is always me—an individual with her own awareness and consciousness, who exists before any linguistic considerations. Very often, when I dream, I cannot tell whether I am speaking Italian or English, and I imagine that the deepest core of who I am looks exactly like that: a state of being that is pre-linguistic, despite the central role languages play in my life. All of this is just to say that I struggle to identify clear boundaries between my English-speaking self and its Italian-speaking counterpart.
That said, I think the difference in my translation practice—if indeed there is one—can be found, perhaps, in how I rely on my instinct, whether I let it lean more towards the source or the target. Over the years, I have learned when to trust my gut and when I need to double-check my intuitions. The funny thing is, this balance is ever-shifting and I don’t doubt that I will have to readjust for it again and again throughout my career as a translator.
WM: In navigating the winding sentences and paragraphs of this story, you mention—again in your translator’s note—using the Po River as a guiding image. Indeed, there’s a tremendous sense of life and movement in your prose. I wonder if you can expand on how the image of the Po guided you.
AL: It was only during later revisions in which I started to feel that Remmert’s descriptions of the Po also applied to his writing, where the strong undercurrent of pure creativity is kept at bay by the even stronger embankments of his incredible control over syntax and style. As for my understanding of Manu as a character, this image only came to me when I was finalising the translation as well. When I first read the story, I certainly noticed how powerful the prose was, but hadn’t fully perceived its syntactic intricacy and complexity. Remmert really is a brilliant writer for managing to hide the heft of his prose behind the most naturalistic of voices.
WM: Which contemporary Italian writers should be better known in the Anglophone world and why?
AL: I will limit an answer that risks becoming very long to one author who I am actively pitching at the moment: Ornela Vorpsi. Vorpsi, who is also an artist and a photographer, was born in Albania, and moved to Italy in her early twenties after the fall of the Communist regime. She started writing in Italian, but then moved to France and now writes in French, making her a trilingual writer. I find her writing not only charming but almost entrancing, especially when she deals with the topics of sensuality and death. Vorpsi has a very personal way of using language that reminds me of a dark fairy tale, and I suspect that this uniqueness of her writing has something to do also with the fact that she is writing in a second language—by which I mean that she comes at Italian from a fresh perspective that sees right through the linguistic cliches and the cultural common places that abound in every language. I find her work to be an excellent reprieve to that naive and untroubled approach to multiculturalism that we were discussing earlier, which still seems to be quite prevalent today.
WM: As an emerging literary translator with a background in technical and academic translation, can you speak to the process of moving into literary translation? What obstacles do you encounter as a literary translator that weren’t present in your previous work? Do you have any advice for emerging translators that you wish someone had shared with you?
AL: Literary translation has always been the end goal for me. After I graduated from university, I was able to get into commercial translation relatively easily, and I naively imagined that I would also be able to quickly transition into what I felt was my true calling. I spent many years waiting for this shift to happen ‘organically’, but it never did, so eventually, I decided to get serious about it. I attended Bristol Translates and then applied for the National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentorship, which I was lucky enough to win. Of course, that was the real turning point for my career: all of a sudden, I was no longer an ‘aspiring’ literary translator but an ‘emerging’ one. That small semantic shift made a world of difference to my self-esteem. Then, in July, Asymptote published my excerpt from The War of the Murazzi, which in turn prompted a publisher to contact me to find out how we could collaborate, and now I am very happy to say that I am working on my first full-length literary translation, which is due to come out next year.
For me, the biggest obstacle to pursuing a career in literary translation was (and is) the sheer amount of time a project requires in its early stages. On top of the translation itself, pitching, applying, and submitting can also be extremely time-consuming and are rarely paid. I do hope that, as my name becomes more established, this aspect of my work life will improve.
My advice for fellow emerging translators is to try and pursue every opportunity that they get wind of (within the limits of energy, time, and general sanity!), even if they seem far-fetched or unlikely. Last January, I put a lot of focus into the preparation of two submissions and two applications. I thought that one of them would be a sure thing, two were possible but not necessarily likely, and the last one was definitely out of my grasp. I wondered if it was even worth submitting for it, but then did it anyway. Well, I actually didn’t get the first three, but the last one, the one I almost did not submit, turned out to win the first prize in the John Dryden Translation Competition. This is to say that we’re not always the best judges of our own work! It’s taught me an important lesson: just put your best work out there as much as possible and, sooner or later, you’re bound to get something back.
Antonella Lettieri is a London-based translator working into English and Italian. She was the 2023 NCW Emerging Translator Mentee for Italian and was awarded first prize in the 2023 John Dryden Translation. Her translations, articles on literature and creative writing have been published in English and Italian magazines. A complete list is available on her website.
Willem Marx is a writer, teacher, translator, and assistant editor of fiction at Asymptote Journal. His work can be found in Necessary Fiction, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere.
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