Posts featuring Antony Shugaar

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.

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From the Archives: “Resistance Is Futile” by Walter Siti

May 21, 2015  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Patty Nash

In this ongoing series, a look at fiction from our January 2015 issue translated by Antony Shugaar

What is “autofiction?”

I don’t know. I really don’t. “Autofiction” belongs to the category of words I’ll habitually skim over in lieu of context clues. (Also in this category: “antifiction,” “matron literature,” “ergodic literature”—any ideas?). Critics toss around categories such as these so flippantly, practically taunting their readers to look them up on Wikipedia, but unless I get the sense that the term is particularly operative, I am likely to continue reading.

I came across “autofiction” more recently: after reading the incredible excerpt from Walter Siti’s Resistance is Futile from our latest issue (translated from the Italian by longtime blog contributor/superstar translator Antony Shugaar). In his translator’s note, Shugaar says that Siti’s “approach is called autofiction” and that “Siti seems to swing it over his head recklessly like a heavy gold chain.”

I’m intrigued. But first and foremost, I’m intrigued by the excerpt itself, because Resistence is Futile is incredible. Written in increasingly circular retrospect, the story’s more a taut deferral of linearly cruel memory than anything resembling realist fiction, but that’s not to say it isn’t visceral, gutting, utterly material, and wrenching, as it recounts the youth of an unfortunately corpulent young boy, Tommaso.

The boy’s fat—that’s because he was a slow eater as an infant—and worse still, even that’s because the mother may or may not have “somehow been jinxed, conceived under a bad star” after she “got it stuck in her head that the child had been generated the very night that her husband came home drunk (and as far as that went, nothing out of the ordinary), cursing and washing the blood off himself.” READ MORE…