Posts filed under 'italy'

Translation Tuesday: “Invasion” by Diego Lama

July 25, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Rose Facchini

The throng grew. There were people with greatcoats, mantles, furs, swords, sandals, wigs…

This Translation Tuesday, we present an oblique scrap of fiction from Diego Lama, translated into compact, equivocal English by Rose Facchini. An apparition disturbs Alfio from his espresso: his grandfather, dapper, smiling, and back from the dead. In the space of four hundred words, things only get stranger.

Alfio was sitting in the café when all of a sudden, he saw an old man appear. It was his grandfather.

“Hi, grandpa.” Alfio stood up, holding his demitasse.

His grandfather was a tall, thin gentleman of respectable appearance. He had big, blue eyes and a kind expression, reassuring, always elegant, always in a suit, always with polished shoes.

“Hi, grandpa,” Alfio repeated.

His grandfather had been dead for more than fifteen years. Alfio perfectly remembered the shoes and jacket they put on him the day of the funeral.

“Hi, grandpa,” he repeated a third time. “Weren’t you…?”

“Yes, I was,” the grandfather said, smiling in his own way, as if everything—even death—could be resolved with a witty remark. “I was. But now I’m alive!”

“I don’t get it.” Alfio sat down. “I just don’t get it.”

“Me neither, but I’m happy.” His grandfather remained standing. “Your grandmother’s also come back!”

“Grandma?” Alfio placed the demitasse on its saucer. “But… Grandma died more than sixty years ago, when dad was only a little boy.”

“A tragedy.” The grandfather smiled. “The important thing is that everything ended in the best possible way. We’ll just have to make do for a little while. Grandma and I need a place to stay, Alfio.”

“Go to dad’s house!”

“He’s too old. If he sees us, he’ll have a heart attack,” the grandfather smiled. “You’re not going to leave us high and dry, are you?”

“Of course not, grandpa. Where’s grandma?”

“There.” READ MORE…

Ernesto Calzavara: Between Dialects and Words

March 3, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Marina Dora Martino

Calzavara had left Italian behind, a language “in which he could never raise his voice.”

In 1966 the poet Ernesto Calzavara, born in Treviso in the northeast of Italy, published e. Parole mate, Parole pòvare (And. Mad words, Poor words). This collection of poems written in the trevisàn dialect became the emblem of Calzavara’s rebellion against the disappearance of local idioms in favour of the Italian language, but it was also his first step breaking away from the Neodialettali poets and the rural themes and settings of traditional vernacular poetry. The puns and wordplay in this collection are irretrievable in the Italian language—they are part of Treviso as the landscape is, or the weather—but Calzavara believed that dialects had an inherent linguistic power, and only by tapping into that power could they break free from their condition of dying languages. In this essay, Assistant Editor Marina Dora Martino, looks at Calzavara’s poetry in the context of Italian local languages in danger of fading away forever, and considers what it means to remember and forget a language, a place, and a way of life.

Growing up, I absorbed the notion that speaking in dialect was vulgar and inadequate, especially at school. I am not sure where or when my first encounter with the local dialect even occurred—my family (originally from Naples) didn’t speak it, the schools didn’t use it, and most of my friends practiced it only with their grandparents, if at all. Treviso, my hometown, is an ancient city in the northeastern plains of Italy, whose local variation of the Veneto dialect is known as trevisàn—the Veneto dialect being a sort of regional language understood everywhere in the Veneto region, from the mountains to the sea. Excluded from school and spoken rarely among friends, Veneto lingered somewhere at the edge of my life for a long time. It was only by chance, picking up a secondhand book at the town market, that I found out about the existence of local poets, and an entirely new literary world opened to me. This is how I met Ernesto Calzavara’s poetry and realised that I had to rethink everything I knew about the dialects of my country.

It is widely known that Italy has many regional dialects, but not everybody knows that they are more than a bit of an accent and the occasional slang word. Far from being only a distortion of standard Italian, dialects are complex and ancient ways of speaking—in some cases languages in their own right—and they have been around since long before standard Italian even existed. They were known as “volgari,” from vulgo (a.k.a. not Latin but the languages that most common people spoke in their daily life) and they had started emerging from Latin itself as early as the eighth century, transformed by virtue of contact with pre-roman local languages (Etruscan, Osco-Umbrian, Messapic, and the like) but also, throughout the years, by the influence (or invasion) of tongues from other lands, such as Gaulish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. The volgari were generally considered inadequate for the high expressions of the mind, so it was normal praxis for intellectuals to write and discuss their work in Latin. This was until Dante and Petrarch came around, bringing their Tuscan dialect to the forefront of poetic innovation and proving once and for all that volgari could take on the most exalted topics (the Sicilian school of poets had prepared the ground in this sense) as well as the lowest. Indeed, in De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante went even further and made the argument (in Latin, so that it couldn’t be ignored by the intellectuals) that the mother tongue was more noble because it was learnt from infancy, and non-mediated by grammar. Which makes it all the more ironic that his fourteenth-century Tuscan (and Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s) would later be picked by sixteenth-century intellectuals as the basis for standard Italian, as the result of an educated debate on which of the peninsula’s many languages should become its lingua franca; in reality, a debate of intellectuals for intellectuals that had little or nothing to do with the life of the vulgo. In 1861, the year of Italian unification, 78% of Italians were illiterate, and most of them spoke only their regional language. The unionist phrase “we made Italy, now we must make Italians” shows the uneasiness of a young country whose people couldn’t communicate with each other from region to region, which led to standard Italian being made the language of education, politics, administration, and entertainment in the attempt to “italianise” Italy. Despite this, by the 1950s and ’60s the gap between the official role of Italian and its place in the life of people, particularly in rural areas, was still shockingly wide. With the arrival of television the nation found its most powerful tool for counteracting illiteracy: TV programs like Telescuola and Non è mai troppo tardi (it is never too late) are believed to have taught half a million Italians how to read and write.

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

June 30, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

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

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

Chapter X

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

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

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

“No, you can’t.”

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

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

Translation Tuesday: “On the Mountain” by Grazia Deledda

May 12, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

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

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

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

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

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

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In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 11, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Anna Aresi and Sarah Moore

To that grasp / of a palm in another's palm / to that simple act, forbidden to us now—

For the second week of our new Saturday column, In This Together, we present a recent poem from Italian writer Mariangela Gualtieri, newly translated by Anna Aresi and Sarah Moore. Below, Aresi explains the context of Gualtieri’s work and how the poem came to be such an instant success in Italy:

The first case of COVID-19 in Italy was diagnosed on February 21, just days before the Carnival parades and celebrations were scheduled to take place. Everything was immediately canceled and schools were closed, at first only in the most affected regions, until on March 9, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte issued the decree that would bring the entire country into total lockdown. The same day, Mariangela Gualtieri published her poem “Nove marzo duemilaventi” (“March ninth, twenty-twenty”). Within hours, the poem had been shared thousands of times on social media and in messaging apps, effectively becoming the text of the Italian quarantine.

Mariangela Gualtieri is a beloved Italian poet and cofounder of the Teatro Valdoca theater company in Cesena. The company has performed poems and works by major Italian authors, and Gualtieri herself is known for the masterful interpretations of her own works. She read this poem for a local TV channel exactly a month after its publication, on April 9; the recording can be found here (Italian only).

With more time on their hands and prompted by a sense of social responsibility, authors have been prolific during the lockdown, sharing reflections, diaries, and other kinds of writing, often to raise funds for hospitals and other organizations. Only in the months and years to come will we find out what pieces will stand the test of time, but even now we can be sure that this poem is here to stay. Though prompted by an unprecedented state of emergency, Gualtieri’s poem does not read rushed; on the contrary, it is a thought-out, compelling reflection on our (unsustainable) way of life in relation to the environment. Much like Dante’s Commedia, mutatis mutandis of course, the poem establishes a relation between the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm, inviting readers to reconsider our position as both individuals and as a species in relation to the universe.

As a final note on the translation, I should add that a first English translation, by Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford, appeared soon after the poem’s release. Rand and Botsford stated that they “deliberately chose to stick very closely to the Italian structure so that readers who do not know Italian can read the original in parallel and appreciate the language to the full.” With the poet’s permission, Sarah Moore and I took a different approach, seeking to provide Asymptote’s readers with an English rendering that also conveys the rhythm, bold syntactical choices, and flow of images of the original.

March ninth, twenty-twenty

by Mariangela Gualtieri

I want to tell you this
we needed to stop.
We knew. We all felt
how our actions
were too frantic. Staying inside of things.
Each outside of ourselves.
Squeezing each hour—making it count.

We needed to stop
and we couldn’t.
It had to be done together.
Slow down the pace.
But we couldn’t.
There was no human strain
that could hold us back. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Classmate” by Elsa Morante

June 12, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Elsa Morante and Rebecca Falkoff

Our classmate was so indulged by nature that none of us doubted that he was so treated by fortune.

This Translation Tuesday, we continue to showcase the theme of childhood, this time through a story from 1940’s Italy about the ways that children form their own narratives about their peers. The quiet intensity of Elsa Morante’s “The Classmate” gives us a compelling glimpse of the disruption of such narratives. Be sure to also check out the Spring 2018 Fiction section, which also explores childhood. Robert Walser, Joanna Bator, and Jacques Fux, for example, all consider the formative nature of childhood memory (or lack thereof) on identity. 

I was a boy of thirteen, a student in junior high school: among my many classmates, most of whom were neither particularly beautiful nor ugly, there was one who was extremely handsome.

He was too rebellious and lazy to be the first in the class, but everyone knew that even the slightest of effort on his part would have been enough to make him so. None us demonstrated an intellect like his, so limpid and fortunate. I was the first in the class; I had a poetic disposition and, at the thought of my classmate, I had the idea of calling him Arcangelo.

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Art Talks: the Photography of Andrea Modica

June 24, 2015  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Rachel Bonner

"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…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by Michela Zanarella

October 28, 2014  |  in Translations  |  by Leanne Hoppe

Translated by Leanne Hoppe

I Chain Myself to the Origins

 

I chain myself to the origins

of light,

I undo a sunset,

just as poetry touches me,

with my lips I create the fate

of a horizon that glorifies

cemeteries filled with bones.

I rest in the sudden vibration

of a cloud,

intersecting rivers of silence

at the whimsical azure of a crowd

of instants.

Embodied in the exile

of earth and water,

I bind myself to the wind, I yield to the flames.

To eyes permeated by the world

surrounding the sun,

I make myself eternal

like Daphne. I make myself

a forest of olive trees.

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NYC Mayor de Blasio to Stop at Carlo Levi’s Grassano

July 21, 2014  |  in Essays, News  |  by Antony Shugaar

"I never saw other pictures or images than these: not the King nor the Duce, nor even Garibaldi; no famous Italian of any kind."

When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio visits Grassano, the birthplace of his grandmother Anna Briganti, he’ll be walking in the footsteps of not only his forebears but also an Italian author whose first book was a cornerstone of one of New York’s best-known publishing houses. The coincidence is more than a geographic one: the reforming mayor will be returning to a family hometown, but also to a place that led to a masterpiece of social reporting and reformist philosophy.

Carlo Levi’s book, Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli), published in 1945, was one of Roger Straus’s first acquisitions: it was “a harbinger of things to come,” according to Hothouse, a history of the publishing house FSG, “a critical triumph and best-seller in 1947.”

The book was written by Levi, a Turin-born Jewish doctor and painter, who recounts a year of his internal exile in Grassano and a neighboring village, Aliano (called Gagliano in the book), for anti-Fascist activism.  

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Styles and Protocols

July 2, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Antony Shugaar

"Ordinary details are the bread and butter of translation."

“For a long time, I went to bed early.”

With these words (in Lydia Davis’s translation), Marcel Proust began his exploration of memory and perception now known as In Search of Lost Time, formerly titled Remembrance of Things Past.

The two titles bookend a similar concept: was he actively seeking time that had somehow escaped, or was he more calmly remembering things that were simply no longer? Or was he splitting the difference: thinking his way out of the mirror dividing the two positions?

The past, it is said, is another country. Is translation, then, a form of time travel?

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In Review: Pitigrilli’s “Cocaine”

May 1, 2014  |  in Reviews  |  by Patty Nash

A new translation of Pitigrilli's "Cocaine" is as titillating as its title

It should come as no surprise—if titles mean anything at all, that is—that Pitigrilli’s Cocaine was banned shortly after its 1921 publication. The slim Italian novel is not short on the white stuff, and it doesn’t skimp on the excesses we associate with its sniffing: sex, orgies, general underworld shadiness, all glimmering with the luster that illicit substances (if only through their very illicit-ness) can provide.

To readers in 2014, the novel’s purported depravity may appear mellowed, but Cocaine shocks the system all the same. The real blow in reading this nonagenarian novel, rereleased in a new translation by Eric Mosbacher through New Vessel Press, is its stomach-turning linguistic smarts that elevate this by-turns insightful and nonsensical tale to M.C. Escher-esque levels of depth. Cocaine isn’t about the drug, after all: storming through the not-quite surreal, the book reveals the addictive authority of the words we use.

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RIP: Roberto “Freak” Antoni

March 17, 2014  |  in Essays, Multimedia  |  by Antony Shugaar

"One good thing about getting sick, really sick... was that it made him give up drugs."

Roberto Freak Antoni died just short of age sixty on February 12 this year. One good thing about getting sick, really sick, he noted, was that it made him give up drugs. Antoni—or Freak, his moniker among legions of both young and aging fans—was by no means a role model, but  a rock star and poet, and above all a deeply subversive figure in Italian literature and pop culture.

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Forza Italia, Sardegna Possible

February 15, 2014  |  in Essays, Multimedia, News  |  by Antony Shugaar

The Election Campaign of Michela Murgia

A few years ago, I was walking with my wife and daughter up a steep narrow cobblestone street in the medieval center of Viterbo, a town just north of Rome that for many centuries was a papal summer capital. I noticed a tall man dressed aggressively for success, his clothing put together impeccably with a ferocity that struck me as uniquely Italian. He surveyed the passing strollers with an air of command from the doorway of a storefront papered with posters for Silvio Berlusconi’s political party, Forza Italia, a movement named after a soccer cheer. I nudged my wife and pointed to the man: she nodded, but I sensed she hadn’t seen what I had. I think you have to live in a country for a decade to see it through local eyes. Even today it’s hard to convey just what Berlusconi and his followers represent in Italy, unless you’ve lived through it. READ MORE…