Posts filed under 'Italian literature'

Crushing Millennial Ennui: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Latronico’s novel is a deeply personal book of objects gazing back at us, full of questions about authenticity, reality, their significance.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025

In the early 2010s, a specific gastronomic corner of the internet flourished alongside the rise of the Instagram aesthetic; food blogging evolved beyond sites run by home cooks from around the world, and social media brought its democratization to full swing. I too was among the converted. My weekends throughout grad school became increasingly spent wandering supermarket aisles in search of capers, plum sauce, sumac, fig jam, and macadamia nuts—which were especially hard to find in India at the time—while around me, artisanal coffee shops serving cold brews were just starting to appear, and the profession of pastry chef was becoming a lucrative pursuit. At the same time, a new generation of photographers emerged in Berlin’s culinary scene, sharing dreamy images of mid-century tables with pastel ceramic bowls of oatmeal and ruby-red berry coulis, positioned in wildflower fields with Photoshopped late-evening glow. Food, like everything else in life, became a highly publicized mode to exhibit the paragons of life, beauty, and self.

Vincenzo Latronico, a Milanese author originally from Rome, has previously written four books, but the Booker International-nominated Perfection is his first to be translated into English. Though the novel is affecting on several levels, it’s important to note that it will resonate differently with readers of various age groups. As a millennial, reading Perfection was like stepping into the looking glass; at times, it felt like the narrator’s striking delineation of the digitally idealized lifestyle, tinged with biting wit, was aimed directly at me. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Unknown” by Marianna Vitale

It reminds her of when she was a kid and she used to swim into open water, out to where she couldn’t reach, abandoning herself to it.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a delicate story of young love from Italian writer Marianna Vitale, translated by Laura Venita Green. We accompany high schoolers Sara and Lorenzo on their first date, which unfolds in fragments—clinking glasses, tentative touches, and finally, the shared thrill of a ride on a Ferris wheel. The freshness of their budding relationship imbues every moment with a tense beauty. But as their connection deepens, a sudden encounter with death shifts Sara’s perspective, forcing her to confront life’s essential ephemerality. Struggling to articulate her emotions to Lorenzo, she finds herself overwhelmed by the desire to let go. With its subtle exploration of first love and the inevitability of loss, the story intertwines themes of youthful passion and untimely death with lyrical elegance.

Leaning against a wall, his hands in his jeans pockets, Lorenzo has by now stopped tracking the minutes. He’d been told that girls make you wait, but Sara should have been there half an hour ago and he’s beginning to worry she’s changed her mind. 

The San Giuliano streetlamps tint the alleys with warm light, and the Saturday evening crowd mixes with the Rimini neighborhood locals. Lorenzo checks his phone again. Then he goes back to staring at his white Nikes and the frayed hem of his jeans. He unrolls his shirt sleeves because the air is growing cooler and more humid. 

When he looks up, he finally sees her: thin, straight legs moving in a hurry, wrapped in dark tights and shorts, a satin blouse that falls softly on her chest, revealing small freckles just above her breasts.

“I’m late,” Sara says.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, greeting her with a kiss on both cheeks. “Want to get a drink?” He points to the entrance of Retroborgo and guides her there, resting a hand between her shoulder blades, barely touching her. “I’ll go ask if we can sit outside.” 

She waits on a stool between barrel-shaped tables. Across the street, two little boys are playing soccer outside a house with red shutters. Sara thinks she’d like to live in this area, so close to downtown. Then she wouldn’t be stuck having her parents drive her around everywhere. 

“Okay, I ordered two spritzes,” Lorenzo says when he returns, sitting down next to her. “And they’re bringing something to eat.” 

“Great.” Sara smiles and exposes her imperfect teeth. They’re one of the first things Lorenzo noticed about her—her slightly crooked right canine overlapping her incisor. 

“You look really nice tonight…I mean, you always look nice.” 

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Handshake with the Devil: The Violin with Human Strings and Other Tales of Musical Madness by Antonio Ghislanzoni

[T]he real value of this collection is its aptly drawn portrait of the music world in nineteenth century Europe. . .

The Violin with Human Strings and Other Tales of Musical Madness by Antonio Ghislanzoni, translated from the Italian by Brendan and Anna Connell, Snuggly Books, 2024

Bach, Liszt, Paganini, Beethoven. . . these virtuosos have been immortalized in western societies—but what about the supremely talented musicians who clawed their path toward the zenith, only to ultimately fall short? In The Violin with Human Strings: And Other Tales of Musical Madness, written in Italian by Antonio Ghislanzoni and translated by Brendan and Anna Connell, the author paints the journey of four such less fortunate individuals. Throughout the collection, a recurring motif seems to ask: Is musical renown attained via wits and ambition, or via preternatural gift? Whatever the answer to the perennial debate on nature versus nurture in musical talent, the four stories here testify that a destructive impulse for mastery will eventually lead to madness.

A contemporary of revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824-1893) was a multi-talented Lombard who began his career as a musician (principally as a vocalist), but turned to devote the latter half of his life to writing, resulting in a prolific corpus of articles, novels, short stories, and some eighty librettos. He was also an important member of the Scapigliatura movement, a loose-knit group of artists in Milan who gathered after the 1860 Unification of Italy. An Italian counterpart to the French Bohèmi, the group idealized patriotism, anti-conformism, and intellectual independence, with its writers being receptive to international writers such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe—an influence that shows in Ghislanzoni’s fiction. READ MORE…

Mario dell’Arco’s Colossal Miniatures

. . . dell’Arco has no problem poking fun . . . but as with the best comics, an edge of seriousness lurks under the poetry’s surface gloss.

Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems by Mario dell’Arco, translated from the Romanesco by Marc Alan Di Martino, World Poetry Books, 2024.

In his homeland of Italy, Mario dell’Arco’s stature rivals that of the greatest Romanesco poets: Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Cesare Pascarella, Crescenzo Del Monte, Trilussa, Giggi Zanazzo. Despite this, he has long been ignored in the English-speaking world, but that is due to change with World Poetry’s recent release of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems, a healthy folio of work that spans the poet’s twenty-nine collections, starting with 1946’s Red Inside and ending with 1991’s Roma Romae. All translated by Marc Alan Di Martino (a talented poet whose most recent collection is Still Life with City), the poems are by turns lively, melancholic, curious, strange, beautiful, humorous, sardonic, and pithy, rendered in a way that moves the reader to savor them like a fine Genzano wine—or, if you prefer, “the whole green meadow” of a pistachio ice cream.

In 1905, Mario dell’Arco was born as Mario Fagiolo. Around age seven, he began writing poems in his native Roman dialect, and placed his first piece—a sonnet—in Nino Ilari’s L’Amico Cerasa when he was just a teenager. Later, as he became an architect and helped design such structures as the post office in Piazza Bologna and the Zodiac Fountain in Terni, he invented a pseudonym that would reference this vocation: “Archi-tect, arch, dell’Arco.”

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What’s New in Translation: February 2025

February's latest in translation.

In this month’s round-up of recent translations, we present eleven titles from Japan, Iraq, Colombia, Indonesia, Austria, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Slovenia. From neorealist postwar fiction to the graphic novel, stories capturing the tides of time and the turbulent eras of violence, narratives of migration and mystery, innovations of the short fiction form and unconventional looks into classic tales . . . these titles are invitations into hidden places and profound sights, stark realities and dreamy visions.

aperfday

A Perfect Day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, Other Press, 2025

Review by Rosalia Ignatova

Nanae Aoyama’s short novel, A Perfect Day to Be Alone, is the English-language debut of its lauded young author, offering a delicate exploration of existential drift through the eyes of Chizu, a restless twenty-year-old, and Ginko, her elderly relative who takes her in for a year. While the narrative is sparse on action, it is rich in atmospheric detail, focusing on the quiet moments that shape their unlikely cohabitation.

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Held Together by Dreams: On Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment

Her characters are profoundly human, each wrestling with their own fears, hopes, and desires . . .

Abandonment by Erminia Dell’Oro, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky, Héloïse Press, 2024

Why do we leave behind people and places? Is it painful or bittersweet? Does it indicate bravery or cowardice, altruism or egoism? Do we have complete agency in these decisions or are we instead constrained by necessity, oftentimes masked by the illusion of choice? What kind of person do we become in the aftermath?

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In my dreams I reply like this

Either way, it too is a kind of reply—to the call of literature, the call of writing.

For her translation of Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment, Oonagh Stransky received one of the prestigious PEN Translates awards in 2023; one year later, this powerful, lyrical novel is due to arrive by way of Héloïse Press on September 15. Rendered into English with great sensitivity and intimacy, Abandonment tells the story of a mother-daughter pairing in Eritrea, and their alienation from both local and the colonial Italian communities in the aftermath of racial laws. Stransky fought for its appearance in the English-language for twenty years, and in the following essay, she speaks on the emotional, introspective process of translating this tremendous work, and why she has remained so determined that the world should read it.

abandonment

It’s July 2024, and I’ve received the proofreader’s notes for Abandonment. I need to reply to an issue with the passage below:

“Then Sellass felt a deep languor come over her and she understood that her body was dissolving into the seawater, that the wave she had become was returning towards the light and slowly breaking on a beach where the shades of the dead had gathered. Even Mariam’s shells were there, specks of darkness on the sand, and a hand reached out to grab them. The wave tried to speak, to tell her that she was Sellass, but the voice was only a watery gurgle, and the shades, going through the gestures of life, ignored the coming and going of the wave.”

The proofreader says

This is a bit confusing—reads to me like the wave is speaking to Sellass, but if I’ve understood correctly the wave IS Sellass? And she’s trying to speak to Mariam? I think the confusion is using “she” to refer to the wave, if it read ‘to tell her that it was Sellass’ it would be clearer.

I reply

Using “it” does fix the problem but ambiguity and the gendering of the wave are important to both story and style. Actually, the original Italian doesn’t say that the wave is trying to speak to Mariam. It just says, L’onda tentava di parlare, di raccontare che lei era Sellass. . . I suggest modifying that line to: The wave tried to speak, to say she was Sellass. . . This keeps the female gender of the wave and retains an element of ambiguity.

In my dreams I reply like this

The world of this book is filled with objects that we readers might commonly see as neutral but that are attributed gender by characters who need them to survive, who see their fragile lives building and then crumbling, over and over, casually, randomly, like waves. Sellass in this instance is indeed the wave, and because the wave in Italian is a feminine noun, she is both wave and girl. More than trying to address Mariam here, Sellass is receiving a message from the universe that she is a mere mortal, that she coexists with death, with the shades. Her daughter, Marianna, will be made aware of her own mortality, but she is accepting of it, which in turn allows her to survive and not become a victim; this awareness is the key to her resistance.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Italian

How does one evaluate the works of a writer who paradoxically championed women’s rights and supported an ultra-patriarchal regime?

Principle of Decision takes a close look at the manifold, careful decisions made by translators in their interpretations. Each participating translator is given the same excerpt of a text to render into English, revealing the various incarnations that can stem from even a single word. In this edition, Catherine Xinxin Yu presents a piece from the Italian writer Ada Negri.

When I was casually browsing at a book fair in 2023, my eyes were caught by two descriptors on the back of a tiny claret booklet featuring Ada Negri’s works: ‘feminist literature ante litteram’ and ‘twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature’. I had to find out who this Ada Negri was.

Ada Negri (1870-1945), born in the northern Italian city of Lodi, grew up in a working-class milieu and began earning a living as a schoolteacher from the age of seventeen. She published her first poem La nenia materna (Mother’s Lullaby) in 1888, her first poetry collection Fatalità (Fatality) in 1892, and continued to garner literary acclaim through the 1910s. Her gaze was directed outwards, encompassing the struggles of the Italian working class of which she was a part, but also turned inwards, voicing her intense emotional turmoil as a woman, a lover, and a mother. At the same time, she actively participated in socialist projects like the Lega Femminile di Milano and co-founded the Asilo Mariuccia in 1902 for at-risk women and minors.

In 1917, Negri published her immensely successful short story collection, Le solitarie (Solitary Women), from which the excerpt below is drawn. Eighteen grayscale character studies provide ‘humble glimpses into the lives of women who fight alone: alone despite family, alone despite love, alone due to faults of their own, of men, or of destiny’, as the author wrote in the book’s preface (translated from the Italian). This collection was groundbreaking in its focus on the tribulations of lower-class women and unflinchingly tackles taboo subjects from female sexuality and abortion, to marital unhappiness and the lack of care for the elderly.

So far, so good, right? But Negri was also a controversial figure who achieved her status partly due to her staunch support of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In the 1890s, she befriended socialists active in Milan, such as Filippo Turati, the Russian-born feminist Anna Kuliscioff, Nobel peace prize winner Teodoro Moneta—and Benito Mussolini, who identified as a socialist at the time. But by the outbreak of WWI, as Mussolini’s break with socialism gave way to his avowed fascism, Negri definitively sided with Mussolini’s bellicose patriotism and distanced herself from the antimilitarist democratic socialism of Turati and Kuliscioff. She would go on to win the Premio Mussolini in 1930, become the first and only woman to be admitted into the Accademia d’Italia in 1940 (a short-lived hall of fame for intellectuals in fascist Italy, if you will), and follow government directives in her long-standing collaborations with major newspapers until her death in 1945. READ MORE…

Poem for a Vanishing World: On Translating Orlando Furioso

Chivalric romances . . . had been popular for centuries. . . . At the same time, though, the world that they were describing was vanishing.

Ludovico Ariosto’s magnum opus, Orlando Furioso, has only been translated into English four times since 1900. After first appearing in 1516, this epic has become an indispensable entry in the Italian canon and remains one of the longest poems in European literature, numbering over thirty-eight thousand lines in forty-six cantos, telling tales of love, war, tragedy, and fantasy across continents, seas, and even the cosmos. In our Spring 2024 edition, we presented a daring translation by Steven Monte of one of the poem’s most famous episodes—a fantastical voyage to the moon, which demonstrates at once the ecstatic potentialities of poetry, the corruption of art by human vices, and all the ways by which the self can be lost.

In the following interview, Monte speaks to our very own Assistant Interview Editor Sebastián Sanchez about the challenges and delights of rendering the best-selling book of the sixteenth century into English.

Sebastián Sanchez (SS): Despite his influence on European literature, Ludovico Ariosto’s work is underappreciated in the Anglophone world. What drew you to translate Orlando Furioso?

Steven Monte (SM): The underappreciation is partly what drew me, but perhaps more than anything I wanted to translate the specific episode of Astolfo’s trip to the moon. Astolfo is my favorite character in Orlando Furioso, and translating one episode was plenty challenging. When I discovered that the most recent verse translation of the epic-romance—David Slavitt’s—did not include this famous section, I was even more motivated.

SS: Whenever I read an early modern text—I am thinking specifically of those by Rabelais and Cervantes here—I am surprised by its liveliness and audacity. Do you think Orlando Furioso has a contemporary relevance which might surprise new readers? 

SM: Absolutely. First off, as with the two authors you mention, Ariosto is funnier than twenty-first-century readers might expect. And again like those two authors, he is self-aware; the narrator often addresses the reader, or a subset of his readers, in a knowing and urbane way. Finally, Ariosto often feels modern in his depiction of female characters and gender relations. This last element is not so much present in the episode that I translate, which focuses on two male characters and is something of a spoof of Dante. But note the irreverent way in which Saint John discusses the entire epic tradition and the way in which other poets, like Virgil, misrepresented characters like Dido.

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The Story as Experience: Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa on Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard

[A]s ephemeral, beautiful, and delicate as these stories are, they are firmly grounded in history. . .

In Butterfly of Dinard, the great poet Eugenio Montale leads the reader up to numinous looking points along the towers of everyday experience, pointing us towards an innate sublimity and magic—how individual vision and experience can strike pedestrian sceneries with an extraordinary intensity of meaning. Originally published as columns in the Corriere della Sera, fifty of these stories have been translated with extraordinary care and finesse by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, and in this interview, they speak to us about the affinity between Montale’s prose and poetry, the revelations of translation, and how such stories travel from the page into personal realities, deepening and celebrating the spaces, people, and objects that—if looked at closely—“reveal a great truth.”

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I wanted to start with asking you both about the crossings between Montale’s poems and his prose works. What do both of you consider Butterfly of Dinard to be saying to us on its own? Is there an independent author to be found, or should we read his prose as dialogic with his poetry?

Marla Moffa (MM): I would say that there are various symbols in the poems that we can also find in the stories. Considering that he wrote Butterfly of Dinard when he was in his fifties—after the two main volumes of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones and The Occasions, and concurrently with The Storm and Other Things—it’s as if he’s regrouping in these stories everything that we find in the poems as well.

For example, as Jonathan Galassi points out in the introduction, Montale speaks about the eels in the story “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and just at the mention of the word eel on the menu for the protagonist, the narrator has this flashback, because the eels represented something special in his youth. There’s also the poem “L’anguilla / The Eel” in Montale’s poetry, which is one of his most important poems. It’s interesting to be able to read the two pieces in parallel, but at the same time, I feel like the stories are independent. If you don’t know his poetry, and you just read Butterfly of Dinard, you can still enter into Montale’s world. He even says himself that if one wants to know his story, that this is the book to read, because it is quite autobiographical.

Oonagh Stransky (OS): I agree with what Marla said, and the only thing I would add is that one of the things that appeals to me most about these stories is really the element of humour—the self-deprecating humour and irony. As in his poetry, there are moments of existential crisis, of gaps and sudden shocks, but there is also a delight in life, and a delightfulness that he attributes to so many different things. The nostalgia towards his past is one aspect of it, but I also like how he talks about himself—how he describes this figure, who may represent himself, as bumbling and Chaplin-esque, as Galassi calls it. It opens up new windows onto Montale the man, and who this very mysterious and obscure Nobel-winning poet was. Here we see him as a man in slippers, with a turban on his head, holding a rug up to scare away a bat—all those things are elements that allow the reader to feel more familiar with him. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Your Drowning Father” by Michele Orti Manara

“Cuuut,” my father shouts. “Arianna, you can’t look straight into the camera—if you do, the scene won’t work!”

A lake and a film set are both sites of trauma in today’s unforgettable Translation Tuesday showcase—a sensitive coming-of-age story by Italian author Michele Orti Manara in frequent contributor Brian Robert Moore’s effortless translation. An actress in a film set has been hospitalized;  the narrator—a mere twelve-year old with zero acting experience—has been asked by her director-father to step into the role. Many unsuccessful takes later, the father makes the narrator revisit a distressing incident from her childhood—all in the name of coaxing the performance he needs. 

What do people do when we’re not watching them?

We pretend so much in public that there’s no way to know what happens when we shut a door behind us and stay on our own with our things, our faults, our smells.

It applies to everyone, in any moment.

It applies to me, too, when after selling the last tickets for a screening I open the door to the storage room and go inside.

“Now what’s down there?” the late audience members must think while heading into the theater. A fleeting thought, because then the dark of the theater swallows them up, and the film starts.

*

When my sister and I are eleven and twelve years old—and feel the inevitable crazed desire to have the house to ourselves as much as possible—one afternoon, between a sip of fruit juice and a bite of a cookie, she asks our mother: “How come you don’t work?”

And our mother, who has in front of her three baking trays, a pot brimming with ragù and a continent of handmade pasta, says without turning around: “Because your underwear doesn’t wash itself, because the groceries don’t walk all the way here on their own legs, and because otherwise no one would have time to deal with these fucking lasagnas.”

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2024

Taking a closer look at Asymptote’s milestone issue!

Not sure where to start with our tremendous fiftieth issue? Our blog editors talk their favourites.

In its overarching theme of “Coexistence,” Asymptote’s monumental 50th issue draws together the quiet, the forgotten, and the unseen, allowing us to inhabit worlds that are not our own. From the bright unease of Elena Garro’s “The Week of Colors” (tr. Christine Legros), to the serene, dynamic stanzas of Eva Ribich’s Along the Border (tr. Julian Anderson), to the dedicated love in Almayrah A. Tiburon’s “Keyboard and Breastfeed” (tr. Bernard Capinpin), Asymptote’s Winter 2024 Issue examines the relationships we have with each other, with the world, and with ourselves.

Dark and unflinching, Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter delves into the ambiguous history of the author’s mother Lucia, her parents’ joint suicide in Rome, and all that was left behind. Central to the piece are physical mementos—two old photographs of Lucia, a list of items left in a suitcase, clippings from a newspaper—from which Calandrone pieces together the story of her parents’ lives, revealing aspects of a woman her daughter barely knew. Alongside the photos come memories passed down and memories created, as Calandrone pieces together the life of a young woman who was nearly forgotten. 

Translated by Antonella Lettieri, Your Little Matter is a work of empathy—of putting on a parent’s shoes, of imagining the pain and the love of the life that led to yours. The lives of our parents are distant, disconnected from our own. Even for those who knew their parents, the question of who they were before we existed can be haunting. What did you lose when you had me? What did you gain? It can be a self-centered venture, as relationships with parents often are, and Your Little Matter simultaneously veers away from and embraces this selfishness. Who were you? Why did you have to leave? I want to remember you; I want you to be remembered. Calandrone’s condemnation of the society that killed her parents; the somber moments spent amidst photographs, imagining; the love she holds for someone who can only be known retroactively—these elements draw you into Lucia’s life, her story, unforgettable. READ MORE…

The Full Meaning of Events: An Interview with Antonella Lettieri

. . . failing to fully understand the other might just be the most human experience of all.

“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.

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Keeping the Mystery Alive: On Translating Michele Mari’s Verdigris

[A]ll books, especially the really good ones, seem impossible to translate until you sit down and somehow translate them. . .

Italy’s lauded Michele Mari was first introduced to the English language via a collection of thirteen short stories, published as You, Bleeding Childhood; through translator Brian Robert Moore’s rendering of Mari’s singular voice, readers were able to enter a vertiginous realm of obsessions, hidden psyches, childhood revelations, and wondrous horrors. Now, Mari and Moore are returning with Verdigris, a novel that further displays Mari’s masterful construction of mystery and fantasy with the story of a young boy, Michelino, and his developing friendship with a strange groundskeeper, Felice. The translation earned Moore a PEN Translates Prize earlier this year, and in the following essay, he gives us some insight into his process, and tells us why Mari is deservedly recognized as one of the most important Italian writers today.

When I first encountered Michele Mari’s Verdigris (or Verderame in the original Italian), I experienced something rare, wonderful, and a little bit eerie that I’m sure most avid readers can relate to: the sensation that a book was somehow made for me. Its sense of otherworldly mystery, its dark humor, and its beautiful, inventive style all came together to form the exact kind of novel that I could gladly get lost in for ages. It likely would have been the first book I’d have tried to translate, had it not seemed beyond my capabilities at the time. But all books, especially the really good ones, seem impossible to translate until you sit down and somehow translate them, and so I eventually decided to make an attempt. It was too captivating a novel and too glaring an absence in the Anglosphere, and I hoped my own enthusiasm and love for Mari’s work might carry me through.

The first major difficulty in translating Verdigris is Mari’s use of wordplay, which, rather than appearing decorative, often plays a very direct role in the novel’s plot—a plot that is as intricate as it is engrossing. I realized there was no way around being particularly visible as a translator in order for this novel to reach anglophone readers: one could either rely heavily on the original Italian wordplay and speak directly to the reader through explanatory footnotes, or assume an even more active role and try to recreate Mari’s fluid inventiveness in English. Hoping the book could remain as immersive in English as it is in Italian, I opted for the latter approach throughout. To do this, it was essential to keep in mind not only the novel as a coherent whole, but also Mari’s broader autobiographical and autofictional body of work. Any literal changes had to remain consistent with his personality both as writer and as character, and I was fortunate to be able to run all of my solutions by him. Finding English equivalents for puns, word associations, and, most of all, anagrams takes a great deal of thought but also an incredible amount of luck—or, in the case of this book, maybe there was something else at work, and the fact that almost uncannily fitting solutions could be found in a completely different language had to do with the mysterious and occult forces invoked within the novel. For me, living day by day, for an extended period of time, in the world of Verdigris meant partially believing such things. READ MORE…