Posts featuring Antonella Lettieri

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2024

January 22, 2024  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel and Xiao Yue Shan

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

January 8, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Willem Marx

. . . 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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