Nice little stories with happy endings or some kind of moral resolution? Not for La Ferrante!
As an Italophile and an Elena Ferrante fan, I’m thrilled to see her nonfiction work, La Frantumaglia, finally making it into English in the form of Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, published this fall by Europa Editions.
I know the book will intrigue American readers with the backstory of her novels and her life as a writer (I’m also thrilled that the original title has largely crossed the Atlantic intact, particularly given the unusual provenance of the Italian word, “frantumaglia,” which Ferrante culled from her mother’s speech and which she defines as a jumble of ideas or thoughts).
One could nonetheless argue, given the nature of the book—a collection of manuscript drafts, interviews and letters—that it will surely fail to stir up the same excitement as did the Neapolitan series or her earlier novels. This is the author, after all, who launched her novel, The Days of Abandonment, with the line: “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.” Boom! Not to mention the creator of the frenzied, passionate scene between Nino and Elena in the bathroom of the house she shares with her husband, Pietro, from Book Three of the Neapolitan quartet (a scene Elena rushes into after rushing out of the arms of her young children). Whoa! How do you top that?
And of course, it’s not like Frantumaglia confirms (or denies) what Italian investigative reporter Claudio Gatti recently sprung on the literary world (if for no other reason than it had already gone to print). Gatti, as anyone remotely following Italian literature knows, believes he has pulled off an expose by studying real estate records and other documents to deduce that Ferrante is actually a translator named Anita Raja. (Edizioni E/o, Ferrante’s Italian publisher, has denied the claims.)
Yet I can confidently say the Ferrante lines that have made the biggest impressions on me are in La Frantumaglia, which was first published in Italy in 2003.
It's that time of year, and we're proud to recognize six wonderful pieces of literature!
We are thrilled to nominate the following six articles published during the past year for the Pushcart Prize. Please join us in giving a round of applause to both the authors and translators behind these incredible pieces.
At 997 words, Pedro Novoa’s devastating short story, “The Dive”, won Peru’s “Story of 1,000 Words” contest. Translating this nautical thriller cum family saga into English, George Henson made it an Oulipian exercise by keeping the English text under 1,000 words as well. Shimmering with poignancy, the multi-layered story delivers a powerful allegory about the blood ties that bind even when broken—the concatenation of islands we will nevertheless always be.
“To translate means, therefore, not only to exercise extreme vigilance over the movements of the original text, but above all to scrutinize the limits of one’s own language, as it creeps up to the original.” Via co-translators Rebecca Falkoff and Stiliana Milkova, Anita Raja’s magnificent essay frames “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance” and argues that the translator’s greatest resource must be her own inventiveness.
I’d much rather they stuck J.K. Rowling’s name on my book than insisting on mine. We might even sell a few copies.
Our resident translation expert Daniel Hahn is back with a response to the hotly debated issue of how and where to credit translators’ work. This question comes from Michelle Loh in Singapore.
Why aren’t translators’ names on most book covers? Are you for or against this practice of keeping translators’ names hidden?
Some people believe that readers are scared of translations. They assume—whether rightly or wrongly—that a reader is more likely to pick up a book whose front jacket reads
Title of Great Novel!
by
Name-Of-Awesome-Novelist
than a book whose front jacket reads
Title of Great Novel!
by
Name-Of-Awesome-Novelist, but actually not really because I’m afraid it’s been translated by Unrecognisable-Translator-Person so it’s probably quite obscure and kind of foreign and anyway you know what translations are like (LOL!) and tbqh you can’t even really be sure of what you’re getting…
(I paraphrase, slightly.)
Their argument, then, is that translations are hard enough to sell as it is without your having to remind people that the book is a translation before they’ve even picked it up. There are plenty of publishers I like very much who make this argument, and I do understand. I do think it underestimates our readers, but where most publishers are concerned I really don’t see this as a lack of respect for the translator’s work.
In order to transmit the trauma experienced by Pavlensky, Sentsov, and Alyokhina, playwright Nicolai Khalezin also traumatizes the audience.
This hell-bent play by what The New York Times has called “[t]he world’s most visible and lionized underground theater” keeps finding ways to pull the rug from under the feet of astonished audiences.
“It will not be his balls, but ours, behind the door,” a buffoonish technocrat rants to his doppelgänger, as the two leisurely defecate in their ministerial toilets, in unison. Moments later, the other one expounds on the evils of modern art: “Before Picasso, art was normal.” (As it turns out, he owns two of the deviant’s paintings.) When they finish shooting the shit, and shitting, they pull up their government-issued trousers to discover a lack of toilet paper. Following the pair’s exit, masked bandits inexplicably slip onto the stage to replenish the needed supplies in a sort of winking parenthetical—or, better still, a puckish middle finger.
These gag lines satirizing the absurdities and hypocrisies of dictatorships—specifically the Putin regime—are the sort of irreverent zingers that some of us relish: comedic relief with a reactionary backhand, using both shock and shtick to slice through inaction and fear. It’s a particular specialty of Burning Doors, performed by the UK-based Belarus Free Theatre, which celebrated its tenth anniversary last year despite being banned in its home country. Currently in the second staging of its UK tour at the Soho Theatre, one of London’s essential performing arts labs, the show is a wielding and warped montage of vignettes based on the testimonies of artists targeted by Putin. These include the Russian artist Petr Pavlensky, who nailed his own testicles, referenced above, to the cobblestones of Red Square; the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is currently serving a twenty-year prison sentence in the Russian Far East; and the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina.
For the entire duration of my last meeting with Laura, in her office, the sharp blade of a box cutter quivered a few millimeters from my jugular.
Via Ann Goldstein, also the translator of Elena Ferrante, here is a colorful extract from Emanuele Trevi’s Something Written, winner of the 2012 European Literature Prize and finalist for Italy’s Strega Prize. In a few deftly executed strokes, the literary critic recreates the cutthroat atmosphere presided over by a former boss (aka “Madwoman”), and mulls over what he took out of that period of “extravagant daily persecution”.
Among the many—too many—people who worked for Laura Betti at the Pier Paolo Pasolini Foundation in Rome, all of them endowed with a colorful store of more or less unpleasant memories, I believe that I can boast of, if nothing else, above-average endurance. Not that I was at all spared the extravagant daily persecution that the Madwoman (as I soon took to calling her, in my own mind) felt it her duty to inflict on her subordinates. On the contrary, I was so irredeemably odious to her (there is no more precise word) that I succeeded in plucking all the strings of her protean sadism: from the ceaseless invention of humiliating nicknames to real physical threat. Every time I entered the offices of the foundation, in a dark, massive corner building on Piazza Cavour, not far from Castel Sant’Angelo, I sensed almost physically the animal hostility, the uncontrollable rage that flashed, like the zigzag lightning in a comic book, from behind the lenses of her big square sunglasses. The standard greetings immediately followed. ‘Good morning, little slut, did you finally figure out that it’s time to GIVE HIM YOUR ASS? Or do you think you can still get away with it?!? But you don’t fool ME, you sweet-talking little slut, it takes a lot more than someone like you’—and this first blast of amenities was ended only by the eruption of a laugh that seemed to come from a subterranean cavern, and was made more threatening by the counterpoint of an indescribable sound halfway between a roar and a sob. Very rarely could the avalanche of insults dumped on the unfortunate victim be traced back to meaningful concepts.
If Italy were my child, I’d fear he was unable to properly love his own identity.
My partner travels a lot for work and whenever he goes somewhere that he can snag Italian pubs, he brings me back an armload. Usually two editions of an Italian newspaper (La Repubblica and Il Corriere della Sera), one or two of the news weeklies and a lifestyle or travel mag like Bell’Italia.
I array them all on the dining table and prepare to immerse myself in an Italian mag reading marathon. It’s a ritual we’ve been performing ever since leaving Italy years ago to come back to the States.
Yet in the past few years, there’s been a fly in my spaghetti, so to speak. My beloved Italian periodicals are littered with English words and phrases. That complaint can extend to many of the news articles I see online or in my inbox on a more-or-less daily basis.
Recently, a promotional email from the Italian women’s magazine “Io Donna” about an article on swimwear caught my eye (I love swimming). The email read, “4 accessori must have per la spiaggia.” (Four “must-have” accessories for the beach).
Something snapped—and I began writing this essay. Or really, this rant. It’s one I’ve been honing in my head, if one can hone a rant, for years. I’ve held off on sending this thought out into the wider world because it somehow felt churlish, as if I were a Luddite.
At first blush, the complaint has nothing to do with the literary world or the world of literature in translation that Asymptote celebrates and chronicles. An ad for swimwear: of all the silly things to write about!
But who learns a foreign language only to read, say, Dante? I want to read Dante and the Italian newspaper and the weeklies and advertisements on the Metro and the underground comic books and so on. I want to know the Italian equivalent of “must have.” READ MORE…
I don’t care who Elena Ferrante is. I know some people really, really care, including some folks at The New York Times, which just published an article on the Italian author’s mysterious identity. Some people, it would appear, won’t let it rest until they know the name of the author behind the so-called Neapolitan series of novels, which has rocked the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic.
But not me. Every time it comes up, I think, “I don’t care.”
And it’s not because I’m only slightly interested in Italian literature. Oh no. Italian literature is my life. My idea of paradise is being in a room in Italy—any room—where I’m so surrounded by the Italian language, I feel submerged. I read the Ferrante books one after another in the original Italian. I even have a copy of the Italian newspaper article about Ferrante’s identity that inspired the article in The Times. (My partner happened to be in Switzerland the weekend it appeared in an insert to Il Corriere della Sera, and he brought it home for me).
It’s not because professional nosiness is foreign to me. I’m a journalist, in fact. READ MORE…
"Although Slovak authors do give interviews and appear in public, events where the author is represented by their translator are very rare."
My Brilliant Friendis the 30th book to be published by INAQUE, a small independent publisher in Bratislava, and one of very few in Slovakia to specialise in translated literature. Elena Ferrante’s books appear in INAQUE’s Women’s Fiction series, which features stories by Jamie Quatro and Tessa Hadley, among others. Titles planned for 2016 include TheStory of a New Name, part two of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga, Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days and Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, life stories of distinguished and unjustly forgotten women who lead a full and fascinating life without the need for fathers, brothers or husbands.
***
Julia Sherwood: Sometimes an encounter with a book or an author is almost a story in its own right. Where did your own stories intersect with those of Elena Ferrante’s novels?
Aňa Ostrihoňová: Sometime in 2006 in Villerupt in France, I went to see Days of Abandonment during a festival of Italian cinema. A friend was keen to see the movie because, like three other movies shown that day, it starred her favourite actor Luca Zingaretti. I was struck by one scene in particular, in which Olga, the protagonist, is talking to the editor of a publishing house who has asked her to translate a novel. The editor tells her that the manuscript she delivered is a great story but it’s not the book she was supposed to translate. Later I realized this was a ploy the scriptwriter used in order to include in the movie the story of La Poverella, which comes back to haunt Olga in hallucinations from her Naples childhood. The scene doesn’t occur in the book.
"...it’s worth noting that Ferrante’s translator, Ann Goldstein, a writer for the New Yorker, has become a household name among literary types."
Last year, a hashtag became wildly popular in the American literary scene for an author no one has seen and who writes in a foreign language.
This year, a different author—one whom everyone knows because she’s won a Pulitzer Prize, among other honors—is taking the nearly unprecedented step of publishing a memoir called In Other Words in dual language format. And—wait for it—the part of the book that contains her original manuscript isn’t in English.
The two authors have something in common: they both write in Italian. That, and they could be presiding over a renaissance in Italian literature (Well, they may be, if publishers, cultural organizations and/or the Italian government exploit this convergence. More on this later).
The first writer is the mysterious Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, celebrated on Twitter by the slogan #ferrantefever, and the second is Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born, American citizen who decamped to Rome in 2012, with the unusual project of ceasing to read and write in English. (The two have something else in common: Ann Goldstein is their Italian-English translator).
One author shooting to prominence, and shining a spotlight on Italian literature from the inside, the other already enjoying almost unparalleled prominence in American letters, choosing to embark on a courageous path—one which will almost certain provoke curiosity about Italian among non-Italian readers.
Is Italian literature, both in translation and in original form, having its moment? Oh gosh I hope so.
"The diners leave concern and worry outside as they pass through the restaurant doors."
Father and son stand on the quay of the Tiber, contemplating their next move. Antonio’s thin and wavering form towers over his baby-faced son. The pair has failed to find Antonio’s stolen bicycle. Both wear defeated expressions.The future looks grim. Antonio cannot work at his job plastering the city in advertisements without a bike. The modern city requires mobility and his has just been taken.
They stand in front of a restaurant, a proper place with coiffed children eating pasta and waiters in button down shirts and aprons. Antonio knows he cannot afford lunch out but offers his son a pizza nevertheless. As they walk towards the restaurant he says, “Why should I kill myself worrying if I just end up dead?” He is desperate but refuses to give in to misery. Bruno lights up. The two enter excited to forget for a while both the bicycle thieves and the eventual return home empty handed.
A band plays perky tunes while bourgeois diners sit around in fine hats smoking, eating and drinking red wine. Antonio bursts into the restaurant. He hesitates in the entryway for a second, soaking in the line he has just crossed with his son in tow. They exchange a few glances—Bruno uncomfortable and unsure only proceeds after his father assures him that they can sit at a table in this restaurant. Antonio and Bruno take a table without a tablecloth. Behind them, a family eats lunch. The youngest son sits back-to-back with Bruno, hair greased just so in a crisp white shirt and button down. He pulls a melted cheese sandwich away from his mouth, stretching the curds to their limits.
Antonio tries to order a pizza. The waiter says, “This is not a pizzeria.” The distinction between pizzeria and restaurant surprises Antonio: a reminder, a gentle nudge, that this establishment serves other food to other kinds of people. Unlike the terraces and zinc bars in Nadja, the public at this restaurant is selective. The family just behind father and son serve as a counterpoint. That lunch is big and festive: pasta, sandwiches, abundant wine, laughter, tablecloths and clean hands.The diners leave concern and worry outside as they pass through the restaurant doors. They have the luxury of time and money, both of which buy them prolonged distance from the war-torn city beyond the restaurant walls.
Instead of pizza, Antonio orders mozzarella on bread and a whole bottle of wine, despite the waiter’s suggestion of a half. He tells Bruno to save room for dessert. Antonio beats along to the music while Bruno looks lost. Antonio gulps down his first glass and says, “We can do anything we want, we’re men.” He will not be restrained by social position. Eating lunch in this restaurant is a quiet provocation. They push the physical boundaries of the city by sitting at a table in such an establishment. In his choice to forget and to ignore his material circumstances, to indulge in the luxury of not working, Antonio insists on his and his sons’ right to the same spaces and food as the classes who have the permanent luxury of selective vision. (It is true that his wife is at home working throughout this whole scene, and whole film: the fact that they can do whatever they want because they are men is critical.)
The boy behind Bruno eats mozzarella on bread as well (what looks like a grilled cheese sandwich to me) with a fork and knife held properly and managed with grace. When the food arrives at his own table, Bruno tries to manage the fork and knife, oversized and awkward in his small hands. Antonio says that they will be happy for now. Bruno gives up with the cutlery and takes up the sandwich in his hands, pulling it and stretching the melted cheese to an impressive distance. He checks to see if the boy behind him has noticed—no. He sees what he wants to and when he wants to. Bottles of champagne arrive at that table while Bruno keeps pulling his sandwich, gobbling up the cheese, and pulling again, racing before the mozzarella gets too cold to stretch.
The floating pleasure of eating and drinking together lasts about a minute before Antonio remembers that his bicycle was stolen, they will have to pay the bill and leave the restaurant without the insurance of work the next day.He begins a set of sad calculations of the money that could have been were his bike locked up safe outside. An otherwise ordinary lunch scene displays the social and economic divisions of a city torn apart by war, struggling with development designed to leave certain people behind while others turn a blind eye. Through eating something different somewhere different, Antonio takes himself and his son on a brief trip to an alternate reality. It works for a short time. The mozzarella gets cold, the numbers add up, and they reenter the public.
*****
Nina Sparling currently lives in Paris where she is a middle school English teaching assistant. Between classes, she writes, waits tables, and bicycles to pass the time. After a year and a half working as a cheesemonger in Brooklyn, she likes to surprise people with fun facts about curd and convince the French that Americans can make cheese too. She also keeps an irregular blog, Salt to Taste, about cooking and eating without regard for details or Instagram.
Asked to review my year in reading and from it form reading resolutions, my immediate response is something I need to call an excited sigh.
Asked to review my year in reading and from it form reading resolutions, my immediate response is something I need to call an excited sigh. For months now, as a judge for the Best Translated Book Award, all I’ve read are eligible books, books published in the US translated for the first time this year. Yet, there were a few months before that reading took over. For years now, I’ve taken pleasure in not being partway through any books when the new year begins, so as to open each year fresh. This year, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s The Golden Calf (trans. Helen Anderson and Konstantin Gurevich) made for a great New Year’s Day read. (To call it fitting, however, would be a lie.) The novel is hysterical, absurd, and clever, fueled by ambitious and clueless characters, fleeing and bumbling in pursuit of fortune.
Taking advantage of a bitter winter, I read the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy from Javier Marias (trans. Margaret Jull Costa). It is rare for a project so vast to also be unflagging in both its entertainment and ability to find new shades and twists for its ideas: of cultural memories, of what it is to read another human being, of violence and intimacy. But this trilogy accomplishes it. From it alone, I could pluck a number of examples of one of my favorite narrative tricks: to make a scene continue endlessly through digression after digression. Unlike any other art form, the novel is thus able to manipulate the experience of time, both of the readers’ and the characters’.
But yes, this year has been a culmination of reading more and more books the year they’re published. The best way I can think about it is by describing the books that stand out in little, meaningful ways. Starting with where I live, in Vermont, so close to Montreal, Quebec literature has had much of my affection this year. Not just the translations, like the Raymond Bock and Samuel Archibald story collections Atavisms (trans. Pablo Strauss) and Arvida (trans. Donald Winkler)—so similar in their arc as collections and interest in familial depths but with different approaches and destinations—but also classics like the narratively unsettled Kamouraska (trans. Norman Shapiro). Anne Hébert’s novel is as much a story of a women trapped by culture and time, and her murder plot, as it is a stylistic achievement, melding aesthetic with the narrator’s psychology. READ MORE…
Having managed to sidestep Ferrante's Neapolitan novels all year, I did, however, enjoy two Italian writers greatly.
Having managed to sidestep Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels all year, I did, however, enjoy two Italian writers greatly.
In the early 1950s, the Italian Luce D’Eramo (1925- 2001) wrote a series of unusual short stories that were first published in journals by the likes of Alberto Moravia and later collected under the evocative if rather literal title of Racconti Quasi di Guerra [Almost Stories of War]. In the first of these she published, ‘Idilli’, we hear the alternating accounts of a young couple living a precarious life as casual labourers on the outskirts of a war-torn city, in a style shorn of every embellishment but nonetheless poetic in its sparseness. Another, ‘Straniera’, is the first-person narrative of a migrant worker in Nazi Germany. We see her strategies of survival: forging medical letters, exchanging contraband cigarettes for bread, and stealing books from burning libraries, until she (nearly) gets caught for defaming the Reich. In the now iconic ‘Il 25 luglio’, the young narrator discovers that Mussolini has been arrested and fascism has fallen.
These, and other stories from her entire career, have now been collected in Tutti I racconti (2014); I’m working my way through the later ones now, and am surprised that d’Eramo, who is probably best known for her novel Deviazione, a devastating account of the narrator’s adolescent infatuation—and subsequent disillusion—with Nazism, hasn’t yet been translated into English, and I hope that someone will soon translate at least one story from this collection for Asymptote. READ MORE…
"Many believe photography is different from language, that it is less culturally contingent. But Modica questions such oversimplifications."
Looking at the work of Andrea Modica, professor of photography at Drexel University and recent recipient of the 2015 Knight Purchase Award for Photographic Media, is a bit like reading a poem for the first time in translation. Engaging with her images, I am struck by the knowledge that I carry my own culture alongside my language, and that my language brings me to my experience of Modica’s photography.
This is to say that what results is a harmonious coexistence of estrangement and intimacy with the image. It’s widely understood that you can never really read the same poem in translation. Many believe visual art (and specifically photography) is different from language, that it is somehow less culturally contingent, or even a container for a sort of singular, “universal” meaning.
But Modica’s work is particularly poetic in that it boldly questions such oversimplifications, drawing attention to the language systems that inform our diverse understandings of images. In one black-and-white photograph, a distinctive silhouette emerges from behind a long, pale curtain, both defined and obscured by its paper or canvas-like veiling. To the viewer, the semiotics of this shadow, with its distinct black and white contours, constitutes a horse. READ MORE…
