Posts filed under 'Italian literature'

Strangeness, Discovery, and Adventure: An Interview with Enchanted Lion’s Claudia Bedrick

June 28, 2021  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Anna Aresi

The publisher brings world literature to Anglophone children. Plus, three recommended titles.

Before 2020 became the annus horribilis, fans of Italian children’s author Gianni Rodari had awaited it with excitement, as it marked the one hundredth anniversary of Rodari’s birth. Countless events and celebration had been planned, many of which still took place virtually, but perhaps even more interestingly, new editions and translations of and about Rodari’s work were issued. Among these is the first complete English translation of Favole al telefono (Telephone Tales), translated by Antony Shugaar and illustrated by Valerio Vidali for the independent children’s press Enchanted Lion Books.

Although Rodari is arguably the greatest Italian children’s author and his fame extends well beyond Italy’s borders, especially in the former Soviet Union, Rodari was never read much in the United States and Anglophone world in general, partly because of his ties with the Communist Party. Intrigued by their choice to publish Telephone Tales now, I had a Zoom conversation with Claudia Bedrick, the publisher, editor, and art director at Enchanted Lion. We began by discussing Rodari and ended up talking about children’s literature in translation more generally.

Anna Aresi: How and why did you decide to publish Telephone Tales now? Of course there was the anniversary, but Rodari was never famous in the United States. Do you think readers are more receptive now? The book has been a great success!

Claudia Bedrick: Yes, maybe. In fact, it was only coincidentally that it was published for the anniversary. We thought it would be published a lot sooner. The translator and I started talking about Telephone Tales seven years ago, but there were delays and it just happened that it was published last year (in 2020). My interest in Rodari stems from The Grammar of Fantasy, which exists in English, translated by Jack Zipes. That’s a book that I’ve known for a long time, a book that I’ve read and relied upon in the formation of Enchanted Lion. So when the translator contacted me about Rodari and Telephone Tales, I was already familiar with him, and I think this was a major difference between me as an editor and other editors he had spoken with. Like you said, a lot of people in the English-speaking world have no idea who Rodari is, even though he is arguably the greatest children’s writer of Italian culture, or one of them in any case.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from The Melee by Valentina Maini

February 16, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Sean McDonagh

The morning is a badly drawn sunrise, there are clumps of light to the left of the scene, the canvas is lacerated in several points.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a young woman loses her hold on reality in the aftermath of her family’s personal and political turmoil in this excerpt from Valentina Maini’s critically-acclaimed 2020 novel, The Melee. Translator Sean McDonagh introduces us to the novel’s protagonists: “Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five-year-old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents.” In the following passage, we see Gorane’s dreamlike world through a powerfully-voiced omniscient narration. Childhood memories careen into present-day hallucinations as we veer further into first person—and deeper into the world of an unstable and unreliable narrator. This meandering stream of consciousness takes life through Maini’s virtuosic prose and masterful ability to warp perspective across numerous narrative threads. A lyrically stunning debut novel from an award-winning poet.

from The Melee

They say they don’t need medicine, they keep repeating that they’re healed. They look at her as if they were thirsty, but as soon as Gorane offers them a glass of water, they shake their heads and say: take us home. It’s impossible to make them stop. She signs some sort of verification form with her typically illegible handwriting. The nurse is called Robledo, she has blonde hair gathered in a bun and white latex gloves. Robledo is an open and frivolous surname that weighs a lot less than hers. It’s the surname of someone who cures. The border between Robledo and Moraza is that between Spain and her home planted in the land they call Euskadi. She moves closer to the first bed, her mother’s. As soon as Gorane comes to a halt, her mother raises herself into a seated position. The strain of that elementary motion moves her face, it seems to detach from the neck, distancing itself and fluctuating in the ether like a fish with no eyes. Gorane follows it with her gaze, she almost doesn’t speak, the fish doesn’t see but continues to swim in the air as if it knew by heart every angle of the hospital bedroom, as if its instinct was enough to give it faith, to not lose itself. This is her mother, this blind fish. Then she sees her father curled up on his side, she sees his incredibly lean and broad back and she thinks of the Oma Forest. In her poor repertoire of metaphors, her father was always a tree trunk, an oak. Gorane is a slender and dry branch that won’t break off. Gorane has spent her life fearing the foot that will break the equilibrium, split the frond; the blood of the branch that will sully the earth like an ancient tear. Her blood is now stone because of a sadistic sprite that has tested its pointless powers on her. She touches the cold shoulder of her father who wears a white t-shirt with red hand-drawn writing. The writing proclaims revolutionary words that she knows off by heart and no longer wants to hear. There’s a twisted snake that wraps itself around a badly drawn axe. They will spare her yet another political tirade, the identity that must form itself and grow through the political, which is nothing without a slogan on its backside. Eyes that shine for other people’s words in which to recognise themselves forever. To learn by heart: shout in unison, and keep the rhythm by clapping your hands. Finished sentences, in protest if possible. Without this you are nothing and you can never articulate the revival of your people towards liberty. But this time, her parents don’t attack with the usual slogans because they are tired, because the exertions don’t help to obstruct the path to a swollen body. It’s a kind of struggle that they don’t know, the one against the body that rots. She goes into the bathroom and washes her hands. The first time for Mum who, blind, slams against the furniture of the hospital bedroom, smiling still, saying everything is fine. A second splash for the back of Dad, his wooden head hidden within his jet black hair. The water will wash away all of the sins, if the job is done meticulously, if Gorane will commit herself to scrub at length, to not leave anything to chance and to the stupid belief that a handful of prayers will be enough to receive pardon. She returns to the room where her parents watch each other, smiling, continuing to talk quietly, or to sing. Gorane would like to tell them that the only reasonable option is rest, to close their eyes and await what passes, what heals, but she says it in silence, to herself, before her mother and her father disappear, engulfed by the first, then by the second swollen eyelid.

They walk side by side along the hospital corridor, Gorane keeps her right hand in her father’s left, her left hand in her mother’s right. The beaten bodies are theirs, but it is Gorane who staggers. Strength is applied to the legs, she squeezes her parent’s fingers, which barely reciprocate. The patrons, the relatives of the sick, the patients, watch only her at the centre of that human line that proceeds like an army in an on-the-ground conflict.

“We’ll need to take public transport, you shouldn’t put yourselves under too much strain.”

Gorane pronounces the words in slow motion, expanding each syllable, she makes every consonant snap as if to stamp it in the air, indelible. She continues to look in front of her, the panorama changes, the people enlarge, her body is as weak as theirs.

“We want to walk” they say in unison. “We need to walk.” READ MORE…

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli

January 4, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

Dissipatio H.G. is . . . an opportunity to unspool our own reaction to the loss of mankind—and perhaps find in it an unexpected sympathy.

Quietly, almost as if afraid to disturb, a new year has made its way into the world. The recession of 2020 into the distance of the past presents an opportunity to not only evaluate the changed world, but also to contemplate our responsibilities in readjusting, amending, and moving on. In a fitting selection, our last Book Club title of 2020 is Guido Morselli’s acclaimed novel, Dissipatio H.G., a text that reconciles the stark realities of mourning with poignant examinations of presence in and amidst so much absence. It is a rare feeling that has somehow, incredibly, become common: What is one to do upon waking up to an unrecognizable world? 

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall, New York Review Books Classics, 2020

Near the outset of Guido Morselli’s short and surreal 1977 novel, Dissipatio H.G., the unnamed narrator sits in a cave at the edge of a steep drop into an underground lake, getting up the nerve to end it all. Meanwhile, down in the valley, in the invented, industrious city of Chrysopolis, the economy booms, not unlike the growth Morselli observed in post-war Italy. Leery of society’s so-called progress, the narrator has retreated to an isolated property in the mountains—but even that is threatened; he’s pushed to the lip of nonexistence when he finds a cluster of numbered stakes in the ground “a couple of hundred paces from my mountain retreat.” After a fever and a frantic investigation, he uncovers that a company plans to build a highway there, complete with entrance ramps, a cloverleaf, and a motel. “As Durkheim might say,” the narrator reflects, “there’s your trigger.”

In the end, he abandons his plan after contemplating the quality of the Spanish brandy he’s brought along for liquid courage. His body’s physical matter simply refuses to accede to his will; he bangs his head on the way out of the cave, just as a powerful groan of thunder rolls through the valley. “The truth is,” he thinks, “a man who draws back from killing himself does so (and Durkheim didn’t see this) under the illusion that there is a third way, but in fact tertium non datur—there is no third possibility: it’s either a leap into the siphon or a dive back into daily life, where the rhythm of everything has stayed exactly as it was and you must hasten to make up for the progress lost.”

But when he returns from the cave, the narrator discovers an entirely unexpected third possibility: while he has chosen to live, the human race has vanished. He inspects the newsroom where he once worked as a journalist, placing calls across Europe and across the Atlantic to determine that for all functional purposes, he is the last man alive. “I’m now Mankind,” he says. “I’m Society (with the capital M and the capital S).” He is, he says, “Incarnation of the epilogue.” READ MORE…

What it Takes to Come Home Again: Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts in Review

September 9, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar

Terranova [. . .] foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism.

Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Seven Stories, 2020

Nadia Terranova’s sophomore novel—her first to be published in English—is a carefully crafted meditation on familial ties and the pernicious effects of unprocessed trauma on a woman’s sentimental education. Originally published in 2018, Farewell, Ghosts tells the story of Ida, a thirty-six-year-old woman who lives in Rome and makes a living by writing stories for the radio. One morning in September, she receives a call from her mother, asking her to come home to Messina—a city that Ida has ceased to think of as hers—to help prepare their house for sale. In sorting through the objects of her childhood, Ida will be forced to revisit the trauma that defined her life: the sudden departure of her father when she was thirteen.

Although we are told that Ida’s father, Sebastiano, suffered from severe depression, his disappearance is never explained, nor is it clear if he is still alive. His fate, however, is of little consequence to the novel, which instead lingers with the living—those left behind in the wake of abandonment. Years after the event, Ida’s emotional growth has been stunted by the failure to come to terms with her pain, a failure exacerbated by the lack of a body to mourn, or even the certainty of death. As a result, Ida has grown into a woman who meticulously and egregiously avoids emotion, preferring to reroute her suffering via the “fake true stories” that she writes. She carries herself—and her relationships—with a composure that betrays a tumultuous undercurrent of repressed feelings, acquired through years of conscious disassociation.

There is, for instance, her marriage—described as a “lame creature”—to the dependable-if-too-bland Pietro, perfectly named for his rock-like reliability and immutability. As Ida remarks at some point, “our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.” Progressively, the novel reveals that this extreme reserve comes from Ida’s adolescent years, in which her mother entrusted her with the care of her father while she went—or, as Ida saw it, escaped—to work. The pain of these years and the culminating abandonment drove a wedge between the two women. “If there was an art in which my mother and I had become expert during my adolescence,” Ida says, “that art was silence.” Even decades later, their relationship is entirely modulated by her father’s absence, governed more by the things left unsaid than those they are able to utter.

It is to Terranova’s great merit that she is able to capture trauma’s potential to stop time in such a limpid manner. Among the novel’s many metaphorical figures (the house and its crumbling foundations, for one) is the alarm clock that belonged to Ida’s father, frozen at 6:16 a.m. on the day he left. “The alarm clock said six-sixteen,” Ida muses, “[and] would say six-sixteen forever.” Victorianists and fans of Dickens will sense a reference to Great Expectations, specifically to the morbidity of Satis House, where all the clocks had been stopped at twenty to nine, the exact time when Miss Havisham realized she’d been abandoned by her lover. Conjuring the specter of Miss Havisham makes abundantly clear just how high the stakes are for Ida, and the extent to which she risks being trapped in the prison of trauma. And while Dickens’s depiction of a woman ravaged by abandonment was inflected by his extraordinary gift for the grotesque, Terranova makes a similar claim about the dangers of remaining stuck in the circuity of grief, even if she foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “What I see” by Beatrice Cristalli

July 21, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

You see, even if I don’t see you / I know you’re breathing inside of us.

Love in the time of lockdown is given voice in Beatrice Cristalli’s “What I see,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Written in response to the COVID-19 crisis in Italy, the poem’s speaker prefaces the piece with a philosophical declaration about fate—through subtle and clever enjambment (the power of the poem’s one punctuated line: “Right?”), this musing becomes the speaker’s guiding question. The poem flows through possibilities and memories, to and from that one pivotal inquiry. Seemingly mundane objects—a toothbrush, a comb, a jumper—are charged with new emotive meaning as they evoke the processes brought about by the lockdown: leaving. Absence. And remembering. The speaker, trapped in the moment when these objects were fixed in place by circumstance, longs for the safety of a missing love.

What I see 

They say all’s subjective
But things play parts in fate
Right?
READ MORE…

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

June 30, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

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

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

Chapter X

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

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

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

“No, you can’t.”

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

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

“The past is anything but”: On Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

June 22, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar

Ferrante aims to shock, and she aims to please. But she also aims to critique.

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2020

Reading is and has always been spatial. Zadie Smith has said it, Henry James said it before her, and I am certain someone else said it even before him. We often enter novels as if they were houses, taking in whole rooms at once, or stopping to admire a well-positioned taboret or fix a crooked frame. Because of this, reading different novels by the same author often gives us an uncanny sense of déjà vu, the familiar feeling of a thing estranged, of perhaps entering our neighbor’s house to realize that, unlike us, they have held on to carpeted floors, or have shown a preference for impressionist art or gaudy vases, but that, fundamentally, our house and theirs were designed by the same mind. This is exactly the kind of unfamiliarity I felt as soon as I began reading The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, translated by Ann Goldstein. At first glance, fans and devoted readers of Ferrante’s work will not be surprised by this novel, which reworks some of the major themes that have made the pseudonymous author a worldwide phenomenon. It traffics in urgent issues like gender and its intersections with class, the tension between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Naples, the perils of friendship and sexual desire, and the hypocrisy that often subtends the life of intellectuals. Ferrante isn’t exactly charting new territory here, and yet, as an undisputed master in rendering the familiar strange, her prose packs a punch just when we are about to settle into a sense of familiarity. With the publication of The Lying Life of Adults, we see an author at her peak, deftly synthetizing the density of her first three novels with the sprawling quality of the Neapolitan Novels, all while managing to uncover complex and challenging human truths.

Unlike its immensely popular predecessors, this novel does not trace a woman’s laborious ascent up the social ladder, but rather begins when the protagonist’s father has emerged victorious from the social battle and is comfortably settled into a middle-class life, which includes a position as a teacher in a prestigious liceo. The story is told in the first person, as are all of Ferrante’s novels. It’s hard to imagine otherwise at this point; prose, for her, serves as a conduit for the most rigorous kind of self-examination, often dragging us into psychic places we’d rather not inhabit. Take, for instance, the uncomfortable scene that opens the novel: Giovanna Trada, at age twelve, overhears a conversation between her parents in which her father calls her ugly. Or rather, she overhears him say that she is beginning to look like his long-estranged sister, Vittoria, a woman in whom “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.” This aunt, whom Giovanna barely remembers ever seeing, has come to symbolize in the Trada household the squalor and indignity of the Neapolitan lower class—her name has, through the years, become a moniker for everything that Giovanna’s father has fought hard to leave behind. Thrown into disarray by her father’s words, an initiation into adulthood of sorts, Giovanna determines to establish contact with Vittoria, unleashing a series of events fated to unearth her family past and shed new light on her present. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “On the Mountain” by Grazia Deledda

May 12, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of Vision

April 22, 2020  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Franca Mancinelli

Before this city is scattered or rises like a curtain over the void. Keep living in it, believing in this space, stay.

Franca Mancinelli (b. 1981) is one of the leading poets of her generation and has received several important prizes in Italy. I have had the pleasure of translating all of her published poetry to date: her prose poems in The Little Book of Passage (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018) and her verse poetry in At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019). Her writing is cherished by readers because of the way she grapples with wounds, losses, and what she has called “fault lines”—sometimes personal in origin, sometimes not. By writing, she often seeks to transform these negative events or situations into something potentially affirmative. The title of her new book of poems, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto, which is forthcoming in September at Marcos y Marcos, comes from a line in one of her poems that expresses this new possibility of vision: “All the eyes that I have opened are branches I have lost.” 

Over the years, Mancinelli has also written compelling personal essays. Published in anthologies and journals, these texts often evoke her hometown of Fano or meditate on works of art. Such is the case with “Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of Vision.” Mancinelli bases her text on a fifteenth-century Italian painting that is found in Urbino at the National Gallery. The painting represents an “ideal city” from which all, or nearly all, the inhabitants seem to have fled, arguably because of some invasion or plague-like disaster. Her text is a kind of reverie on this painting: its architecture, its empty city square and buildings. It raises the question of stepping into the painting, of having “the courage to cross the threshold, [to] enter the darkness, hollow and round like a belly that has taken you back into itself.”

—John Taylor

It emerges when I close my eyes. As clearly as an island suddenly appearing beyond the haze and the mist on the horizon. You see it and can only believe your eyes even if you know you are daydreaming. It happens every time in a different light, as if that square and those streets were the setting of a story. Perhaps only the ghost of a voice that has taken a breath, a gust skimming over the cobblestones, whirlwinding dust across the space, beating lightly on the windows like a bird that has lost its flock.

With sure footsteps, I was heading towards the half-open door. That of the large pagoda a magic spell had brought to a stop at the center of this gently drawn desert. I was moving forward over the large, ash- and sand-colored marble slabs. I could not take my eyes off the geometry seemingly guiding me to the center, like a rolling marble that gathers speed, approaching the hole where it must fall. The darkness beyond the door and a growing fear could have gripped my body and kept me from moving, but it was impossible: my steps continued towards the center while my terror was blooming like a black flower. The door might have opened slowly, then widely, to the breath of the void barely covered by the constructions that now seemed made of cards. They have been aligned in a lukewarm light, but, as you see, they cannot halt the fathomless blackness pressing outwards from the windows and the half-open doors. If you enter the pagoda you sink into the center of the universe, in an endless fall. The beast looks at you, awaits you, pretending to sleep with its hollow eyes: six large square pupils in a clear mellow sky that tells you not to believe in the darkness, not to be afraid. Come to the center; enter. You can imitate a childhood game and jump only on the light or the dark slabs. Precisely, calibrating each movement as if your life depended on it. With such concentration, obediently, you can advance to the foot of the staircase. Now you’re there, standing in front of the dark crack. You have gathered all the soft light of this scene; you have the balmy sun concealed by buildings but warm and sure, as in a late morning without school. You can see the pagoda slowly turning on its axis like a carousel without horses and without music, so slowly that it seems almost motionless; yet it rotates—of this you are sure—rotates like the earth. At the top, the almost invisible thread supporting it could lift it up again, restoring its airy foundations. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2020

April 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Austyn Wohlers, Clémence Lucchini, Jacqueline Leung, and Sarah Moore

New literature from Algeria, Guadeloupe, Italy, and Japan!

In the newly ruptured world, the questions that arise all seem perplexingly novel. It is somewhat of a tonic, then, that one turns to literature to find that the queries that confound us now are more specific reiterations of questions that have plagued humanity for a long, long time. What is freedom? How do we persist through the turmoil of our nations? What does the past mean for the present? And, perhaps most pertinently, what survives? In this month’s selections in translated literature, four astounding works from around the world encounter and contend with these problems in their singular styles. Below, discover a passionate novel about a real-life Algerian bookseller, a Guadeloupe-set fiction that intermingles personal and national revolution, the latest English-language volume in Roberto Calasso’s grand series on human civilization, and a Japanese literary sensation which contends with feminine pain and perseverance.

our riches

Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi, translated from the French by Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2020

Review by Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant

Though one cannot truly stress all the qualities of Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi’s first translated novel into English by Chris Andrews, within the limits of a book review, Adimi has certainly proved that she is able to convey Edmond Charlot’s life long passion for books in less than two hundred pages. In this historical fiction, recognized with two French literary awards, Adimi finds a new way to portray her native Algeria: through Edmond Charlot’s many literary endeavors.

For those who do not know Edmond Charlot (I was among that group before reading this book), he left a great gift to the publishing world by being Camus’ first publisher, by publishing under-represented authors, and last but not least, by pioneering the design of book covers as we know it today in Western Europe, referred to as “the talk of the publishing world” in Adimi’s work. READ MORE…

Voices From Uber: An Interview with Maria Anna Mariani

March 23, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Maya Nguyen

I think that all confessions are driven by some common engine . . . but the time-space of Uber is particularly intimate and sealed.

Uber was once the most valued startup in the world and is used in over 700 cities. In Voci da Uber: Confessioni a motore (Voices From Uber: Motor Confessions), Mucchi Editore, 2019, Maria Anna Mariani performs the experiment of steering conversations with Uber drivers toward revealing intimate details of their lives—toward confession. These confessions are then written into a narrative. Her writing articulates the nuances of communication in the way that only the best of dramas can otherwise capture. This is perhaps the by-product of the oscillation between small talk and confession, where the positions of speaker and listener change so fast one only has time to recalibrate after the fact. I was drawn to the subtle tensions and evasions that contour the openings of contact, empathy, and understanding in such a dynamic terrain of communication. Here, Maria Anna Mariani talks about the process of writing the book and the unique space of Uber that allows for confession.

                                                                                                —Maya Nguen, March 2020

What is a repetition: JOHN 

Route: Streeterville-home
Time: 38 minutes
Traffic: tricky
Car: gray Hyundai Elantra
Average rating: 4.95

Select the material with an eye to variety and alternating themes, discard if there’s already a similar story and cut any nationality that appears twice. This is what I’d decided on when I began writing these pages. Structural constraint number one: avoid repetition. But now I have something to ask you: is a murdered brother a repetition? Which story about a murdered brother should I cut to avoid repeating myself? The one about Aisha or the one about John? Telling someone else’s story without permission, the story of a still breathing someone, is the supreme form of violence: we frequently debate the ethics of exploiting biography, and rightly so. But an even more treacherous problem, it seems to me now, is what to leave out: what I abandon to the unsaid as flawed—flawed because it retraces another life, in its ordinary but also extraordinary moments. What is a repetition?

Maya Nguen (MN): In John’s chapter, you write that you are “telling someone else’s story without permission,” even when that someone, John, wants to tell it. Yet, in Aisha’s chapter, she is reticent and you actively urge her on with your questions. Can you talk about your process in writing this book?

Maria Anna Mariani (MAM): Everything started during one of my rides. The driver and I were doing a bit of small talk, as you usually do when you get into an Uber. And then, all of a sudden, he revealed to me the most personal thing about himself. It was so personal and so haunting. For many days after the ride I found myself thinking about that interaction. What happens to communication when two strangers find themselves locked inside a moving capsule with no way out? How is it possible that the conversation can oscillate between its two antithetical poles: impersonal and stale small talk and the most intimate and daring confession? I wanted to find out. And so I decided to pay the utmost attention to the interactions during my subsequent rides and to retrace these conversations in my writing. But then something else happened. I started manipulating actual conversations in order to push them to their limits, already fashioning them into narratives. The writing got the upper hand. And it became a performance. READ MORE…

Wild Imaginings of Truth: A Review of Elena Ferrante’s Essays

January 15, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Angela Glindemann

We cannot contain the world, in its multitudes and messiness, within the constraints of our text, even when we are claiming to write nonfiction.

Incidental Interventions by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2019

Early in her new collection, Incidental Inventions, Elena Ferrante describes her fascination with a portrait of a nun, displayed in the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples. Its artist is unknown, but Ferrante forms a relationship to the person behind the painting all the same, through the work itself. Although the life and experiences of the artist remain out of reach, Ferrante feels that she could give a name to the creator who is knowable through studying the work: a female name, Ferrante surmises, which would then be “the only true name used to identify her imaginative powers.” 

As I began to reflect on this new collection of articles, I related to this desire to lend language to the snippets of truth that we grasp in life, and to search for meaning in others’ artistic expression. Back in 2018, reading Ferrante’s column for The Guardian as it was published week by week, I had formed an impression of these articles as a light yet thoughtful series of reflections on experiences from the ordinary to the dramatic. Reading about topics as diverse as feminism and the exclamation mark, I’d felt that I’d drifted along from colourful anecdotes in the author’s signature style, through to the often philosophical conclusions that felt natural, or even obvious, in light of the path I’d been encouraged to follow as a reader. In this process, I felt that I was getting to know the author, sharing in snapshots of her life, and feeling a sense of connection from the moments that felt relatable or right within my own world.  READ MORE…

“Unintentional Unity”: Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini on translating Amelia Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary

September 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Translating Rosselli’s prose is not different from translating her poetry. Her language is equally challenging, her syntax equally subversive.

Amelia Rosselli’s work is deeply marked by her family and personal history. Born in 1930 to a British activist and a martyred Italian-Jewish antifascist, she lived as an eternal outsider in France, the US, the UK, and Italy. A polyglot with persistent depression, her poetry challenges. It challenges the confines of genre and conventional syntax, it challenges the society with which she was ever at odds, and it challenges the reader to accompany her through her brave literary wanderings. Rosselli ended her own life by jumping out the window of her fifth-floor apartment in Rome in 1996.

Obtuse Diary, published by Entre Rios Books in late 2018, is the first and only collection of Rosselli’s prose. The writing spans a number of years and is organized into three sections and two illuminating afterwords, one by the author and one by one of the translators. Asymptote’s Lindsay Semel spoke with Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini, two of the collection’s three translators, about the joys and challenges of rendering Rosselli’s stunning and difficult Italian into English.

Lindsay Semel (LS): Tell me about the origin of this project. How did you come to translate this text together? What was the collaboration process like?

Deborah Woodard (DW): Translating Amelia Rosselli’s Diario Ottuso into Obtuse Diary was quite the saga. It’s a little book, but it took forever to translate. Giuseppe Leporace, my first co-translator, and I brought out some sections of the Diary in The Dragonfly, a selection of Rosselli’s poetry, back in 2009. After we finished The Dragonfly and brought it out through Chelsea Editions, I decided to rework Obtuse Diary and publish it in its entirety.  When Giuseppe became too busy to review it with me, he graciously stepped down from the project. On Giuseppe’s suggestion, I worked on the Diary with Vanja Skoric Paquin, a talented young linguist with a particular gift for unraveling snarled syntax. When Vanja gave birth to her daughter she, in turn, stepped down. A year or so passed, and then I recommenced with Dario De Pasquale. Dario and I tore the earlier translation apart, sentence by sentence. When Dario became too busy to continue to translate with me (do we see a pattern here?), I was extremely fortunate to join forces with Roberta, my current—and from here on out, sole—co-translator on the final version. READ MORE…

Announcing our March Book Club selection: Trick by Domenico Starnone

April 2, 2018  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Victoria Livingstone

Domenico Starnone’s Trick is the latest treat for Asymptote Book Club subscribers.

“A new book from Starnone is an event to celebrate,” according to Kirkus Reviews, and Trick—the second Starnone novel to be translated into English by Jhumpa Lahiri—is “his best yet.”

Lahiri introduces Trick as an intriguing blend of Kafka and Henry James, a mixture of James’s trademark meticulous elegance and Kafka’s “obsession with the body: with physical discomfort, with weakness, with disease.”

If you’d like to read our next monthly selection, head to our Book Club page for more information. If you’re already a subscriber, why not join the conversation on our online discussion group? To get you started, here’s Asymptote Assistant Editor Victoria Livingstone’s take on the novel…

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