Posts by Matilda Colarossi

Translation Tuesday: “Lucky to be a horse” by Luigi Pirandello

May 16, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

He really can’t grasp the fact that he’s free.

The mystery of an abandoned horse, and what thoughts its mind might contain, are the subject of this week’s Translation Tuesday feature. With the acuity that earned him his Nobel Prize, Luigi Pirandello pores over its gaunt, overworked body and peers into its blankly staring eyes, searching for traces of animal thought.

The stable is there, behind the closed door, just past the entrance to the rustic, downward-sloping courtyard with its worn cobblestones and water tank in the center.

The door has become porous. It was green once, but now it has lost almost all its color, like the house, with that pale-yellow plaster, which makes it look like the oldest and most miserable one in the suburb.

This morning at dawn, the door was locked from the outside with a huge rusty chain, and the horse that was in the stable was taken out and just left there. Who knows why? With no reins, or saddle, or saddlebag, without even a halter.

He’s been standing there patiently, almost immobile, for a long time. Through that door, he can smell his stable, right there, close by, and the courtyard. And when he breathes in through his dilated nostrils, it’s as if he’s sighing.

With every sigh there comes, curiously enough, a nervous twitch of the hide on his back, where the mark of an old saddle can be seen.

Free as he is from any kind of horse tack, his head and his whole body, it’s easy to see what time has done to him: His head, when he lifts it, is noble still, but sad. His body is pitiful: the back is knotted; his ribcage sticks out; his flanks are pointy. His mane, however, is still thick and his tail, although somewhat thin, is long.

A horse that can be of no use anymore, to be honest.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “On How to Be a Good Immigrant” by Elvira Mujčić

June 30, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

Don’t worry about it, somebody had to cry. What the heck kind of story on immigration would it be if nobody cried?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, two immigrants bare the wounds of their respective traumas in this excerpt from Elvira Mujčić’s novel On How to Be a Good Immigrant. Our narrator, a Bosnian immigrant haunted by the atrocities that robbed her of her family and her home, finds kinship with an immigrant from Mali, who opens up about the systemic racism he endures in Italy. Colarossi’s superb translation captures the subtleties of Mujčić’s prose: the uncomfortable silences, the hesitant divulgences, and the quiet pain that follows when the narrator’s emotional walls break down. A meditation on the myriad ways immigrants face trauma and are expected to appease Western stereotypes.

Chapter X

“Can you light a fire wherever you like in Italy?” asked Mele, a friend of my brother’s whom I had met the last time I was in Bosnia.

“What do you mean?” I asked surprised by the sudden turn the conversation had taken from the surreal dissertation on the non-existence of God of just a few minutes ago.

“I mean: can a man light a fire wherever he likes and cook lamb on a spit?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Well, life isn’t worth living in a country like that!”

Why did everything have to take a folkloristic hue, I wondered, annoyed and uncomfortable, like some sort of Austro-Hungarian elementary teacher sitting on an Oriental futon. I was going to meet Ismail when I remembered the incident. It was probably because of our last discussion and the African proverb with which we had greeted each other: “When you don’t know where you’re headed, remember where you came from.” You should have instructions on how to be a good immigrant when you go back to your homeland, I thought. And suddenly I realized that the longing I had felt for tens of years was gone, replaced with a renewed curiosity for that country’s present. But I only loved it if it was set in the past, because it couldn’t harm me from that distant place. My curiosity was not, however, light and untroubled: it was often laden with overwhelming sorrow and paralyzing fear. It was a visceral bond I could do absolutely nothing about, an incessant alternating of thoughts that went from the conviction that I had left something there that I absolutely needed to find, and the realization that what I was looking for was made of the same substance as fog. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “On the Mountain” by Grazia Deledda

May 12, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

The rain stops, the clouds come undone, and great strips of azure sky illumine the air. A fiery eye appears in the distance.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a small community’s hike to an old church becomes a sacred portrait of the pastoral in Grazia Deledda’s short story “On the Mountain.” On a cool day portending rain, our protagonist observes and participates in this exhausting climb through the fields, the woods, and finally the mountain. We can almost smell the petrichor and wet leaves of the forest, and see the ashen expanse of the clouds above the moss-covered boulders (and the Mediterranean Sea makes a brief but memorable cameo). But Deledda’s genius is not merely in the exquisite imagery of this journey; it’s also in how her attention to detail manipulates narrative time. One afternoon feels like an arduous and prolonged pilgrimage through the wilderness. Through sensory parallels and contrasts, nature almost becomes an extension of the old temple; and once their day ends, time immediately accelerates as the spent travellers descend the mountain under a newly cleared and vivid sky.

It’s a morning in August. In the vast sky, closed in by the thin broken lines of the mountain chain, turned turquoise in the distance, glide ashen clouds, like herds of fog, which vanish on strips of still limpid azure. We are on a trail that leads to the mountain, before it reaches the woods. During the night, it rained: the earth, humid but mudless, has taken on dark tobacco-colored hues; it is lined in serpent-like channels of flowing rivulets, and rows of stones that seem made of slate.

Great granite boulders, naked, burnt by the sun, end the trail. No trees yet: just huge thickets of mastic, and fields of ferns, their dentelated leaves turned yellow by the hot sun.

The people climb the trail slowly, in groups, or alone.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Erri De Luca

April 16, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

We pave roads, shovel snow, / smooth lawns, beat carpets, / gather tomatoes and insults, / we are the feet and know every inch of the land.

In this Translation Tuesday, Italian poet Erri De Luca reflects on the Mediterranean migrant crisis and movement across borders, seas, and languages. From desert crossings and the “thrashing of dust in columns” to exploitation in the first world, De Luca poignantly evokes the struggles faced by the newest Europeans.

 

Six voices

It was not the sea that welcomed us
we welcomed the sea with open arms.

Descending from highlands burnt by war and not the sun
we crossed the desert of the Tropic of Cancer.

When from a high ground we were able to view the sea
it was a finish line, a caress of waves at our feet.

Ending there was Africa, the under-sole of ants,
from them caravans had learned to tread.

Under the thrashing of dust in columns
the first man alone is required to raise his eyes.

The others follow the heel that precedes them,
the voyage on foot is a trail of backs.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Future Perfect” by Paolo Zardi

January 9, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi and Paolo Zardi

You are sitting up straight, and don’t know that in less than a minute you are going to die.

The narrator of “The Future Perfect” is riding the bus, listening to the Beatles on an iPod, when a tragic accident occurs on the street outside. Paolo Zardi doesn’t tell us which album it is, but perhaps we can speculate that it is Sgt. Pepper. As a shattering portrait of parental loss and a terrifying vision of the randomness and finality of death, Zardi’s story recalls the songs “She’s Leaving Home” and “A Day in the Life,” respectively. Like those songs, the reverberations of “The Future Perfect” stay with us long after the final line.

I’m sitting on a plastic chair on the number 7 bus, on Corso Stati Uniti, heading towards the station, laptop case in hand, and a sense of satisfaction for the great deal I just closed. You are riding a scooter, an Aprilia SR, with a black leg cover over your legs, a bunny-eared helmet on your head, and a windshield to protect you from the rain. You are sitting up straight, a common female stance, and don’t know that in less than a minute you are going to die. Opposite me, there is a woman who is the carbon copy of a girl who was in elementary school with me, but ten years older; you, in the meantime, drive up alongside the huge window where I’m watching Padua’s drenched industrial area flash by—I can also see a Seat León waiting to exit a side road, five hundred meters ahead of us—and I smile when I see the huge bright “Serramenti Cacco” sign; then, I look down at you, but the visor of your helmet is dark, and I can’t see the lines of your face. You continue driving in your lane, next to us, under a trickle of rain, while on the bus a black kid offers his seat to a man who had no idea he was that old. We will pass you soon, and you, trailing behind us, will crash into the front of a car that will not have yielded the right-of-way; we will only hear the muffled sound of sheet metal buckling, and we will ask ourselves what the noise was; someone will say it was two cars crashing; someone else will add, in the dialect of Padua, “That was some crash!” and then we will all go back to reading our books, to listening to the Beatles on our iPods, to asking ourselves why we hadn’t noticed we had aged. While your mother is preparing the pasta for dinner, a doctor will be trying to reanimate you, pressing his hands down on your chest 103 times a minute, the time it takes to cook the Barilla farfalle noodles; they will be throwing in the towel just as your mother is draining the pasta and is starting to ask herself why you are so late. At eight thirty, sweaty-palmed, she will call you on your cell phone, and on the other end a man will sit down and wait for it to ring just once more, just one more time before working up the courage to answer and explain to the person who brought you into this world what has happened to you; and on this side of the world your mother will slip to the ground and will scream, without understanding, “Oh God, oh my God!” Your father will get up off his armchair, where he had started watching the news of Obama’s victory on channel 2 and, heavy-hearted, he will go to the kitchen; and when he sees his wife sitting on the floor, he will understand everything, immediately; then he will kneel next to the woman he has always loved, and he will hold her as if she were made of fine glass, and, incredulous, they will cry, together; your mother will remember the day she gave birth to you and your father the first time you told him you loved him. Then, in time, your room will become a shrine and your things small relics; your mother will spend her next years listening to your CDs, stuck forever in 2009, hugging the first teddy bear she ever bought for you; your father will slip into a silence that is more and more dismal. But in the meantime, we, the passengers on the bus, will have already arrived home: when your mother was dialing the phone, I had already eaten dinner; when she slipped to the floor, I had finished brushing my teeth; when your parents were driving to the hospital, accompanied only by the sound of their sobs, I was finishing the book on my night stand. And while they were identifying your face, disfigured by death, I had just closed my eyes, thanking the Lord for such a beautiful day.

READ MORE…