Place: Italy

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Lord of the Waters by Giuseppe Zucco

October 14, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Antonella Lettieri

So, this was where all the rain we’d been missing for months had got to...

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a story of the calm before the storm. Picture the sky moments before a fierce downpour: dark, oppressive, hanging over your head like a threat. This excerpt, taken from Italian writer Giuseppe Zucco‘s novel Lord of the Waters, imagines a life suspended in that moment, where the rain never comes. As the external world slows to a standstill, one family’s internal world begins to change. Freed from the obligations of social conventions, work, and school, they quickly descend into a chaotic, easy existence of games, junk food, and neglect, rewriting their familiar dynamics. Beneath their frantic cheerfulness is a persistent anxiety, as they wonder when the amassed rain will finally hit. Translator Antonella Lettieri smoothly captures these currents, refracted through the child narrator’s unaffected voice.

Amongst all the children, I was the first to look up at the sky and see it rear up. I didn’t quite see but rather felt a vast wave soar above me.

I ducked immediately, covered my head with my arms, and, thus crouching, prayed that that wave would not pull me under and wreck me upon the lamp posts and the buildings.

As I closed my eyes, I tried to picture my mother and father, hoping it would help me muster up some courage. All I could see, though, was that gurgling scene, which yet had a certain cheerfulness to it: all the other children and I doing mad somersaults inside the roiling heart of a wave fallen from the sky, our little heads bobbing atop the horrific crests of that brilliant white foam.

My sorrow lasted a second or two; then, since no water came upon us and no dreadful flood crashed down on my head, I opened my eyes again.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur.

At the center of the story is a wealthy notary named Ludovic Possible, who runs a school in Böen—primarily with the motive of getting close to his illegitimate daughter, Aida. When a two-week long rainstorm hits the region, Aida’s mother, Gracilia, dies, and Ludovic reveals himself as Aida’s father, taking over her care. Yet, what truly drives Dahomey’s narrative is the tenets of community and storytelling. Ludovic falls in love with Gracilia because of the way she tells stories, and she passes these tales to Aida; before the child was born, Gracilia “. . . placed a hand on her lower abdomen and told her fertile ovaries the very first story she’d learned from her own mother, who’d learned it from her grandmother, who’d learned it from her great-grandmother. . .”—and so on, all the way back to their first ancestors. Fittingly, the story itself is about a chantrèl who was admired by all: “When she spoke, things would happen. When she made demands, people got to work. With her voice, the rapture caused men to fear for their own sanity.”

Aida internalizes the story and, after her mother’s death, becomes the chantrèl. Armed with the tales passed down from her mother, the young girl builds and fortifies a circle of people who will come to care deeply about her, who will fight on her behalf. Building on the singular capacity of stories to bring people together, Duels captures their particular power within the historical context, demonstrating how the act of telling can frighten those in power and liberate those in captivity.

Whether against an elemental antagonist or a human one, the people in Böen unite to enact change through rebellion. As Duels connects the creation of such solidarities with storytelling, it also works to help the citizens of a tumultuous country imagine a future where violence, injustice, and exploitation no longer govern—necessary work for any nation undergoing immense transformation.

diving board

Diving Board by Tomás Downey, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Invisible Publishing, 2025

Review by Regan Mies READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 10, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Linnea Gradin, and Veronica Gisondi

The latest from Italy, Sweden, and Central America!

This week, our editors from around the world bring news of Palestinian solidarity and the necessity of individual action against genocide, debates surrounding culture and national identity, and the latest laureates of prestigious literary prizes. 

Veronica Gisondi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy

Calls to end Italy’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal politics have intensified in recent weeks. While Italy’s economic and political ties to the Zionist regime are well known, citizens have been reclaiming public spaces with renewed unity and force. From statewide demonstrations on September 22—which drew more than half a million to the streets—to the general strike on October 3, many Italians have reached a breaking point underpinned by enduring forms of political grief. As the genocide in Gaza reaches its most advanced stages, the commitment of scholars such as Majed Abusalama reminds us why continued discussion is crucial: first, to anticipate how the neocolonial project will unfold—not only Israel’s, but that of its global allies—and second, to question our own role in it at “the harshest time of erasure,” both within and beyond cultural work.

Abusalama’s talk, titled “Il futuro di Gaza, la Palestina e noi” (The future of Gaza, Palestine and us), took place at CSA Vittoria, one of Milan’s squats—part of a network facing increasing threats (Leoncavallo’s eviction being a clear example) from municipal and state policies that accelerate urban privatization and erode the city’s relationship with its people. Abusalama, an award-winning journalist, human rights defender, founder of Palestine Speaks in Germany, and president of the Coalition of Lawyers for Palestine in Switzerland, described our present moment as the “last stage” of “a timeline of colonial violence” that has crushed past and future, scarring generations of Palestinians for nearly a century. By refusing to normalize their oppression, Palestinians have become experts in resistance and agency, effectively shaping models of struggle that had been later taken up by movements such as the Black Panthers and South Africa’s anti-apartheid groups. For Abusalama, to never know peace means to know one’s enemy well: for those who stand with Palestine, the enemy is imperialism, it is fascism; a fascism that “did not start on October 7,” but “has been there all the time, from the founding of Zionism until today.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 19, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Veronica Gisondi

The latest from the Philippines, Italy, and Mexico!

This week, our editors report on a workshop centred around disaster writing in Mexico City; a literary festival with themes of urbanism, gentrification, personal history, and war narratives in Milan; and the passing of two groundbreaking translators in the Philippines. 

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Mexico

I used to live with my mother in a small apartment in the eastern part of Mexico City. One day, my bed suddenly shook. I attributed it to a passing truck—but the movement started to feel suspiciously long and, when I realized what was happening, I grabbed Cookie, my dog, and ran out of the building. That day was September 19, 2017, when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook central Mexico, taking the lives of more than three hundred and sixty people, affecting over thirty thousand; it caused the collapse of thirty-eight buildings in the city, and damaged more than twelve thousand. Strangely enough, the earthquake struck on the same date as another historical quake in Mexico City thirty-two years prior, and, worse still, just a few hours after the ceremony commemorating the thousands who had died back then.

Writing from disaster is strange: it is an exercise in personal memory, in archiving, a hybrid between literature and journalism. What matters are the hours, the clothes you were wearing, what people told you, what you held in your hands. And precisely because this year marks forty years since the 1985 earthquake and eight since that of 2017, the Institute of Geophysics and Literatura UNAM—both institutions of the National Autonomous University of Mexico—have organized the workshop Zona de riesgo (“Risk Zone”), which seeks to recover, through creative writing and sound production, the collective memory of two of the most significant events in the country’s recent history. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2025

September 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

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From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.” READ MORE…

Grief and Knowledge in a Dying World: A Review of Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini

September 11, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Stability and instability. Throughout Inn of the Survivors, the theme of balance comes up time and again—literally and metaphorically.

Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini, translated from the Italian by Rose Facchini, Snuggly Books, 2025

Inn of the Survivors is Italian writer Maico Morellini’s debut in the English language, a haunting and eerily familiar work from a sophisticated voice in speculative fiction, arriving in Rose Facchini’s translation. Set in a dystopian future after an unspecified climate disaster, the novella tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl’s arrival at the titular Inn of the Survivors, a haven on the Adriatic coast. Having taken off from her remote home in the mountains overlooking the Po River Valley, and following a three-year trek through Bologna, Forlì, and Cesena, she finally reaches the Inn and encounters others like her: people who have been on the run, trying to survive, living with trauma, grief, or shame. The price of staying? You must tell your story.

Lest you think my use of the second person is casual, it should be said that except for the backstory—which appears in the latter half—the novella is written entirely in the second person. While this narrative device appears often enough in English, it is far less common in Italian, with only two novels coming easily to mind: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino, and the most recent Strega Prize winner Come d’aria by Ada d’Adamo. This is likely due to the Italian third person impersonal (si + verb), which can mean anything from “you,” to the more formal-sounding “one,” to the most passive of voices. As such, choosing to write this tale in the second person was a bold and effective choice on the part of the author, with the new text sounding entirely natural (the ideal result for a work of cli-fi). Yet, thanks to specific geographic locations that are an integral part of the story and the protagonist’s desire to understand her country, it still retains a quality we can call “Italian.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

August 11, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eric Bies, Justin Goodman, Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Baba by Mohamed Maalel

July 29, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Clarissa Botsford

You don't have to do this anymore, Ahmed. Do you want people to laugh at you?

It is a cliche that no one struggles with an overabundance of paternal love—that children are more likely to lack it than to have it in excess. In Baba, the debut novel of Tunisian-Italian writer Mohamed Maalel, young Ahmed is confronted with both lack and excess at once—with a loving father whose repeated expressions of care can never amend the traumatic betrayal this excerpt describes. Clarissa Botsford’s translation is haunting, expertly capturing a child’s tilt-a-whirl emotional life and dawning awareness of adult complexities, his simultaneous craving for love and his harsh refusal to forgive. In Botsford’s words, “The narrative microcosm in Baba powerfully embodies the new dynamics of a multicultural, colorful, and contradictory world, giving life to a story about the search for a blended identity amid religion, tradition, and queerness.” Read on!

A Boy Becomes A Man

When I was six, my father made me a man. Back then, I was convinced I could be anything I wanted. First, I wanted to be a superhero, then a fairy, and later a policeman. I watched the kids’ shows on TV. At six, I fell in love for the first time with Céline Dion, with Lara Croft, and with a cow in the yogurt commercials called Fruttolo. At six, I admired my cousins’ Barbies from afar, imagining what it would feel like to hold something with a figure like my mother’s. When I was six I was a child, with all the typical imperfections of children. When I was six I experienced intense pain. I tried to give it some kind of ironic significance over the years, but pain can only be ironic when it’s not your own. The pain is set against a Tunisian backdrop.

We were traveling with the usual food parcels for my father’s family. Outside, the high temperatures made the car windows scorching hot. My father was listening to the Koran on the radio, which made the air even more sultry tense. My ears received the unintelligible sounds as an annoying hum. During the whole the car ride, he insisted my brother memorize them. He couldn’t do it; he lowered his eyes when my father reminded him how immoral his life as an unbeliever was. He didn’t bother me. Instead, he’d ask me to choose a song on the radio. “You listen nice music Ahmouda, not like your brother’s haram junk,” he’d say.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2025

July 28, 2025  |  in News  |  by Hilary Ilkay, Sophie Benbelaid, and Xiao Yue Shan

Some of our favourites from the latest issue!

With thirty-two countries and eighteen languages represented, our Summer 2025 issue is one of adventure, witness, intelligence, capaciousness, drama, mystery, and more. . . We are more dedicated than ever to this fundamentally compassionate work of building a truly global work of letters, which always starts with admiration and awe—so let our editors be your guide as they share the texts that most moved them from this rich compendium.

In what was deemed by both as a ‘never-ending conversation’, Hans Ulrich Obrist asked Alda Merini if she had any unrealised projects. ‘Yes, of course,’ she responded, ‘I never made love to whomever I wanted to, those are projects that went wrong. Those are real projects. We don’t care about the rest.’ Flippant as this may sound, Merini has only spoken what she has proved in a lifetime of tumultuous, searing, and unbounded poems—that love is her occupation. Love as carnal as it is psychic, as perverse as it is sublime, as unconscious as it is sensational, as much worship as it is despair—in her corpus one finds thoughts racing across topographies in search of adequate metaphor, insanity driving a pin through the core of idea, or the erotic body tingling to the point of immolation. . . To throw the self into love, it seems Merini knew what that truly means; she wasn’t afraid of being taken over by ardor because, after all, it could only have come from her. Love was her fuel, her flesh.

As it is in these poems from Emptied of Love, brought about by a. Monti’s soaring, musical translation. At the very first line, we hear her: ‘Space, give me space—more space’. In other poets this may be read as a plea, but in Merini’s voice, it’s a demand. And with it comes reminder of love’s lawlessness, that it gives us permission to pursue what we want, that it gives clarity to what we believe we deserve. Love makes one bold, she demonstrates, and even in its failures, you mourn boldly, expansively. And it is there, mostly in the devastations of love, where Merini exacts her power. The collection from which these pieces are taken, Vuoto d’amore, is a deeply painful one, full of unrequited affairs of the heart, grief, disappointments, madness. They are grand emotions, and the poet understands that their largesse is best met with simple diction—so it is in the syntactical that she renders her immersive, surprising language:

until the sea submerges
this feeble flesh of mine
and I lie exhausted
on you who becomes the beach
and I, becoming wave,
you strike and strike
with Love’s oar.

READ MORE…

Our Summer 2025 Edition Has Landed!

July 24, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Alda Merini, Bassam Yousuf, Carolina Brown, and Daniel Saldaña París in our AI-themed Feature

Do other people have inner lives? Or are they just NPCs with no consciousness, no soul? We can’t know for sure! Philosophers call this “the zombie problem,” which also happens to be the tagline of our Summer 2025 issue. Not least because there is an actual zombie featured for the first time in our pages via Carolina Brown’s biting cli-fi; the “zombie problem” is also at the heart of any discussion about AI—the theme of this edition’s wildcard Special Feature. Alongside MARGENTO’s extraordinary hybrid human-AI work, we are proud to bring you an exclusive interview with acclaimed translator Boris Dralyuk, a dossier of poems by the beloved Italian master Alda Merini, an excerpt from Lithuanian novelist Valentinas Klimašauskas’s genre-bending Polygon, a pair of pieces by Anna Tsouhlarakis and Syaman Rapongan centering their indigenous worldviews, and our first article from the Azerbaijani amid new work from 32 countries—all of it movingly illustrated by Singapore-based guest artist Xin Lui Ng.

The question of consciousness takes center stage in our Special Feature on AI—not the ersatz sentience of AI itself, but rather the uneasy cognizance, among members of the literary community, of its disruptive potential this side of singularity—hence the Feature’s title, “What AI Can’t Do.” From Daniel Saldaña París’s incisive meditation on AI in translation to S. K. Birk’s tale of a fiction-generating chatbot forced into the role of a lonely girl’s eternal yes-man, these pieces highlight the limits of AI as a tool for transforming the more fundamental problems of a society that too often turns a blind eye to hegemony and suffering.

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Elsewhere, “the zombie problem” becomes grotesquely literal, from the undead trudging across post-climate change Antarctica in Brown’s “Anthropocene” to the humanoid fungi encountered by the hikikomori in Luis Carlos Barragán Castro’s intense mind trip of a story “Cephalomorphs.” One might turn into a zombie too, carrying out inhuman orders on behalf of an authoritarian regime as we see in Syrian writer Bassam Yousuf’s devastating real-life account of a childhood friend-turned-torturer. Even in more idyllic circumstances, one can suddenly discover that one is “no longer there,” that one has become “a suspended, emptied image, merged with its surroundings,” as Slovenian poet Jana Putrle Srdić puts it in “End Of The World, Beginning”; indeed, social norms can disfigure a person until they lead a life that is more performance than living. In Drama, Yannis Palavos gives us the story of a man dogged by crime and a daughter dogged in turn by his memory, her searching monologue part exorcism, part attempt to restore humanity to them both. Appearing in English for the very first time in our fourth Special Feature themed on outsiders, Bolivian author Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’s encounters with Venezuelan refugees unfold across a gamut of misadventures—but through it all he never lets us forget their humanity or his.

In light of the recent flurry of announcements surrounding AI-powered literary translation services, this seems as good a moment as any to gently remind our readers that Asymptote has, for the past fifteen years, been a painstakingly human endeavor. Nothing about our work—from the meticulous curation of each issue to the minutiae of holding together a far-flung, 100-strong virtual team—has ever been generated by machine or delivered at algorithmic speed. If the growing encroachment of AI into daily life has deepened your appreciation for human creativity and labor, we warmly invite you to support us by becoming a sustaining or masthead member. Long live human-powered literature!

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 11, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by MARGENTO and Veronica Gisondi

The latest literary news from Italy, Romania, and Egypt!

This week, our editors-at-large report from prize ceremonies and literary festivals, exploring the entanglement of the literary establishment with the cultural industry and uncovering innovative artists fostering transnational collaboration. Read on to find out more!

Veronica Gisondi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy

Since 1947, on the first Thursday of July, the mannerist nymphaeum of Rome’s Villa Giulia has hosted the award ceremony of Italy’s most closely followed literary prize, the Strega Prize (Premio Strega). Its beginnings date back to 1944—just before the capital’s liberation from Nazi occupation—when a group of intellectuals, writers, journalists, and artists, self-named “Amici della domenica” (Sunday friends) and led by Maria Bellonci, began holding a series of informal meetings that, in the aftermath of WWII, gradually evolved into the literary prize we know today, bringing major works of fiction to national attention.

Last week, Andrea Bajani’s autobiographical novel L’Anniversario (The Anniversary, forthcoming with Penguin Press) was announced as this year’s winner. It tells the story of a family whose emotional life is underpinned by the delicate interplay of violence and subjugation—a story whose end, however, is marked by the writer-narrator’s drastic decision to “abandon” his parents for good. Deprived of psychological and emotional depth, the mother—who willingly gives up on life—functions as the novel’s narrative pivot; for Bajani, her entrenched passivity becomes the vantage point from which to observe the father, a “normal” man—that is, a controlling, aggressive, short-tempered provider—in whom the claim to authority, the shame of failure, and the need to be loved converge in a lifelike if partial portrait.

Bajani’s language is clean, precise, composed; inclined to circumlocution and upheld by an affable disposition, its coldness—along with the frequent use of ellipses—echoes the hollowness of a home where silence reigned, a “perfectly functional, closed” family system, akin to a “carceral” facility. While Bajani’s intent is to reject a 20th-century patriarchal legacy (first by breaking the yoke of secrecy, then by severing ties with his parents), the trajectory of his distancing remains nebulous—suggesting an unwillingness, or an inability, to envision an alternative. READ MORE…

An Interview with Mary Jo Bang on Translating Paradiso by Dante Alighieri

July 7, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I wanted my translation to honor Dante’s decision to write the poem in the vernacular instead of in literary Latin.

In her new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, translator Mary Jo Bang has brought to bear an eagle-eyed focus on the power of lyric poetry. This book is the last of the three that form Dante’s The Divine Comedy—the most widely read of the three being Inferno, where the punishment of the sinners in Hell mirrors the nature of the sins committed in their lifetimes. The same process is at work in Purgatorio, although there, punishment is structured instead as restorative penance, which, once completed, enables the souls to enter the blissful realm of the tenth heaven. In Paradiso, then, Dante travels through the nine spheres of the solar system until he arrives at the Empyrean, where he finds the saved basking in the Eternal Light of God’s mind. Speaking to those he meets along the way, Dante becomes aware that bliss isn’t the same for everyone; one’s ability to feel God’s love in the afterlife depends on the qualities of their time spent on earth.

By translating Dante’s language into modern American English and adopting a matter-of-fact authorial tone, Bang retains the elegance of the original diction. Throughout, she adopts a loose iambic structure and preserves the three-line stanza to echo Dante’s terza rima, an arrangement he devised to gesture to the Holy Trinity. All of these measures combine to honor the imagery and meaning of Dante’s original vernacular Italian, while also acknowledging the fundamental differences between the two languages.

Curious to learn more, I spoke with Bang about the act of “carrying” poetry across from one language to another, the nuts and bolts of her translation process, and how Heaven is different for each person lucky enough to have made it there.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation for you? And has your view of the possibilities of translation shifted over time?

Mary Jo Bang (MJB): The best definition of translation I’ve encountered comes from tracing the term back to the Latin translationem (nominative translatio), which means “a carrying across.” When applied to a text, the suggestion is that you are carrying a text in one language over into a second language. The Greeks used the word for the work of metaphor, which, like the translation of a text from one language to another, is rooted in equivalency and substitution. In the Old French, translation also referred to carrying the bones of saints from one place to another, as relics. It makes sense to me that the preciousness of such bones would have gotten linguistically intertwined with the precious religious texts copied by clerical scribes. The scribes carried a text from book to book, and sometimes also from one language to another. There have been other uses of the word, from the sacred meaning of being transported (translated) to Heaven, to the secular meaning of moving plantings from one place to another.

When I began translating the Comedy, I knew little to nothing about translation. I had taken two translation workshops when I was an MFA student at Columbia in the early nineties, working on translating a French novel, but after I finished my degree and moved to St. Louis to begin teaching, the novel stayed in the cardboard box it arrived in. I don’t know that I would have ever gone back to translation except that I read Caroline Bergvall’s “Via (48 Dante Variations),” and marveled at the fact that in forty-seven translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno, no two were identical. This felt like a demonstration of the fact that there is no single “right” way to translate one language into another; that might be obvious to some but for me, it was a decisive revelation and one that has been at the forefront of my mind in all of the translations I’ve worked on since. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Dear Italian School” by Marilena Delli Umuhoza

July 1, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Monica Martinelli

That Whiteness is taken for Italianness itself represents the very beating heart of this privilege.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a powerful essay by Italian-Rwandan author Marilena Delli Umuhoza, translated from the Italian by Monica Martinelli. A moment of casual racism in her daughter’s school play inspires the narrator to reflect on her own memories of bigotry as an African-origin woman growing up in 1990’s and 2000’s Italy. She traces how racial prejudice is passed down through children’s books, advertising, TV shows, and teachers; Black men and women depicted as criminals or sex objects, always, in some way, dirty. These tropes spill into modern immigration debates, where refugees are stripped of dignity, their suffering sensationalized: “And so there they were, those bodies, taking over my entire television screen without any respect for people in their most vulnerable moment: dead, naked, washed up on Italian shores.” Against this erasure, Delli Umuhoza insists on the significance of writing, of inscribing the truth of Black lives into history. Childhood racism leaves deep scars precisely because it is so pure; children, innocent yet perceptive, directly reflect the biases of society. Blending incisive cultural analysis with raw emotion, the essay makes clear why antiracist education must begin early.

A letter from an African-Italian mother

Last week I attended a musical at my daughter’s school. The show they put on was Around the World in Eighty Days, inspired by the movie recounting the adventures of Phileas Fogg.

After visiting European countries like France and Spain, welcomed by songs of joy and rather coquettish dancers, our hero comes to Africa. Welcoming him there is a person whose foolish way of speaking reminds me of the Italian dubbing actors in the film Gone with the Wind, with their mispronounced monosyllables in a typical “African” accent. I dug my nails into the fabric of my seat’s armrest, as I always do when I am nervous.

The journey continues toward the heart of Africa, where Fogg is chased by a group of Africans for unclear reasons (the acoustics were terrible and the representation pretty confusing). I thought to myself, I’m so glad they cut it. I was thinking of a scene that I had reported to the teacher six months earlier, after my daughter had come home in tears and asked me: “Mom, does grandma eat people?”

“Baby,” I replied, “what are you talking about? Of course not.”

“So why do they make us play African cannibals who eat Fogg at school?” 

“What do you mean?”

“In the scene where he gets to Africa, we have to say, ‘Mmmm … It smells so tasty! What do you say, shall we cook him?’”

I was speechless. READ MORE…

A Word Misunderstood, A Siege: An Interview with Maria Borio on the Italian Lyric

June 18, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation is, rhythmically, a second twin birth.

Plunging into poet and literary historian Maria Borio’s Italian-language collection, Trasparenza (2019), one finds a riveting poetic study on the human gaze, dis/connections of touch, and visual intimacies of modernity. This collection was later brought to the Anglosphere as Transparencies (2022/2025) in Danielle Pieratti’s translation for World Poetry Books. In Braci: La poesia italiana contemporanea (2021), the celebrated scholar Arnaldo Colasanti painted an intriguing portraiture of Trasparenza, describing a blend of the pure and the impure, like the digital screen, an evocation of the imagistic clarity of snow and glass, ether and windows. For Colasanti, Trasparenza reveals desire only for it to be erased and emptied. However, he cautions against reading Dr. Borio’s poetry merely as abstract and argues instead that her work presents a resistance against the concrete, existing in a space that is tactile yet fleeting, spiriting language away towards solitude, lyrical disunity, and oblivion.

In this conversation thoughtfully translated from the Italian into English by Danielle Pieratti, I spoke with Dr. Borio, currently in the central Italian city of Perugia, on her poetry collections, particularly Trasparenza (Transparencies), and the poets and critics that define the Italian lyric tradition.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut into the Anglosphere, Transparencies (trans. Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2022), saw a re-edition in May 2025. Could you tell us what your creative ethos was when writing the poems in Trasparenza (2019)?

Maria Borio (MB): The English translation of Trasparenza led to a book that is slightly different from the Italian original; in fact, we even reconsidered the order of the poems and their division into sections. I would say that it became a transcontinental collection or, if you could call it this, a form of transatlantic poetry. I believe that the book’s core—thinking about transparence in our time—resonated naturally in response to these changes. How can poetry represent certain issues pertaining to those who live in the Western part of the planet—a realm in the midst of redefinition? Transparence connotes our relationships, real and mediated, as well as our way of living, of constructing, of being in the world. Isn’t the language of algorithms also presented as transparent? And can’t we say the same about AI? With one provision: taking care to avoid reducing our relationships and actions to a surface-lacking substance, which has only instrumental ends. From Italian to English, therefore, the book’s interrogation of these problems intensified: how do we avoid making transparence a double game? How do we prevent ourselves from getting caught up in common sense, or slipping into hypocrisy (even when we need it to survive…), or forgetting what responsibility means—and not just responsibility to ourselves.

AMMD: Looking back at your first poetry collection, L’altro limite (2017), and then to Trasparenza, what would you say are the most notable shifts in your poetic vision and approach to writing? READ MORE…