By Eilis Kierans, Alessandro Vettori, and Sandra Waters
“One editing job leads to another”: That catchphrase summarizes the beginning of our translation series, Other Voices of Italy, or OVOI. It was right in the middle of the pandemic and the three of us had been editing Italian Quarterly—the journal of Italian Studies of the Italian Department at Rutgers—for a while when we received a request to publish the translation of a single chapter of a novel. We liked the piece, but we didn’t think it made any sense to publish a single book chapter and we were doubtful the journal’s audience (literary and film scholars) would appreciate it. However, we understood the need for a venue where Italian texts were made available in translation to the English-reading public.
We wrote a proposal for a translation series and sent it to a couple of publishers. After the usual rejections that came very promptly, a positive response came more slowly from Rutgers University Press—but it came straight from its director. What struck the right chord with the publisher and with Rutgers was the philosophy inspiring the series, a collection of unheard voices, neglected books, and untranslated texts. Our intent is to offer a space for marginalized authors and books that were never translated into English or were translated in the past and are in need of a new translation. We spread the word and, without even making a public announcement, proposals started pouring in at an unexpected pace, mostly from translators who had been waiting for this opportunity, but also from scholars who needed the English version of texts for their research and instructors who wanted them available for students in their classes.
The one thing all OVOI translated books have in common is their origin from the margins, either because their authors are exophonic and transnational and have been neglected by mainstream Italian criticism, because the texts deal with problematic themes, or because existing translations do them no justice. Several of the authors we publish for the first time in English are displaced people and a lot of them are women. Some of the stories the books narrate are about gender, sexuality, racial and class discrimination, testimonies of marginalization and abuse. Even when the authors are familiar names in Italy, some texts we selected had been neglected by the translating world because they were deemed minor and less worthy of attention. We welcome all genres (except poetry and children’s literature, which is a Rutgers University Press editorial policy). Besides giving a voice to authors and books that didn’t have one, the series places particular attention on translators, who are no longer the hidden ghost writers disappearing behind their own words, their role completely overlooked, their identity placed at the sidelines.
Translators are often a marginalized category, comprised of a lot of women, who are poorly paid or not paid at all. OVOI places translators at the center; they choose a book they would like to translate and are included in decisions about title and cover image. We made it our policy to move them from the background to the center of the translating process, because we acknowledge that they are in fact co-authors, who forge the same narrative but in a different code system, their role being crucial for the dissemination of creativity and knowledge. That is why their names appear on the cover of the books next to the authors’ names.
The three of us curating and editing the series display a certain diversity as well. We all have strong connections to Rutgers (two are Rutgers PhDs and one is currently a professor in the Italian Department), but we are at three different stages of our careers, one at the beginning, one midway, and one at the end. We were brought together by Rutgers and connected over the journal Italian Quarterly that we edit together. Academic work can be pretty solitary. OVOI has taught us the joy of collaboration.
In the same way this series is the result of serendipity, the books it publishes are often the fruit of extraordinary cooperative work between translator (or translators), authors of the originals (when available), editors, preface writers, and members of our advisory board. We all have an important role to play in the creation and recreation of texts, since no text is fixed in one form for eternity and is always subject to multiple interpretations, transformations, and rewritings. And there is no better way to read (and re-read), understand, and interpret a text than through the exercise of translation. Reading may be a solitary activity but writing and publishing a book need not be the result of individual enterprise. Communication and cooperation have proven to be the best approach to the accomplishment of a sound published product.
We work well together but we also seek advice and we are glad to accept recommendations, so we put together an Advisory Board, which consists of colleagues who are team-players, who work well together, and will have an impact on the type of books we publish in future years. We ask for input on publishing from our colleagues Teresa Fiore, Paola Gambarota, Fred Kudjo Kuwornu, Vetri Nathan, Caterina Romeo, Rhiannon Welch. Considering the proposals we have received so far, while keeping an eye also on what the Italian book market has to offer, we are intending to focus on women, minorities, and gender, three categories the canon has neglected.
Among the texts we have already published are Geneviève Makaping’s Reversing the Gaze, the novel of an immigrant woman’s experiences when first arriving in Italy from Cameroon, a “hybrid work—part epistolary novel, part essay, part biography” (according to Jhumpa Lahiri’s blurb); a book about Chiara d’Assisi by renowned author Dacia Maraini; an essay on writing in a language other than the one we were raised in by Argentinian writer Adrián Bravi; one of the first memoirs by a transwoman entitled AntoloGaia; and a fable on love, ecology, and madness by the unorthodox author Giuseppe Berto, which appeared in print in 1973 and preserves the same transgressive qualities as it did fifty years ago.
Since we started publicizing the series, when the first three books were published in January 2023, we have received over 30 submissions. It is hard to keep up. If the original plan we had devised with the press was to publish two or three books a year, we had to rethink our output. In 2023 we published 9 volumes and we have 8 more in the pipeline that are scheduled to come out between 2024 and 2025.
The excerpts included below are from from Sara Teardo’s preface to Dacia Maraini’s Tre donne, translated by Elvira De Fazio as Life, Brazen and Garish, A Novel, which is one of the texts being printed in the near future.
Three generations of women, with contrasting personalities, barely contained within the walls of a house, whose unity is threatened by an unsettling turn of events… In “Life, Brazen and Garish,” letters, diary entries, and voice recordings are devices that, while advancing the plot, unveil how the protagonists’ relationships evolve over time and how their thoughts and feelings undergo subtle but revelatory changes, bringing them closer together by the end of the novel. All three female figures are deeply invested in trying to make sense of themselves and the world around them, developing different interpretations based on their outlooks on reality, as reflected in their writings.
The difficult task of translation is one of the themes of the novel. Maria is a translator by profession, now in the final stages of completing her rendition of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary. Portrayed as constantly “keeping up with the words,” Maria—herself very close to Madame Bovary in her inability to cope with reality—knows all too well that words are unique and almost irreplaceable and sadly notes, “it is a shame that in Italian the sounds of the words are lost, words that for a perfectionist like Flaubert have a precise meaning, almost carnal I would say” (4). Let us pause on the adjective “carnal” (fleshy, sensual) for a moment. Maria’s final version, born out of her hard work, is presented like a delivery: when the book arrives, it is delicately placed in her arms, and here the English translation of Gesuina’s comment provides a clue: “Here’s the book that you labored over, Maria” (emphasis added). For Maraini, in fact, the very act of translating, as stated in a 1996 introduction to her rendition of Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” “with its physical gesture of leaning over the page for a long time, with emotion, not ignoring even a tiny secret of the text . . . has above all maternal characteristics.”
Can the labor of translation do justice to the force and impact of the original text? When the literary, poetic discourse retains its powerful combination of “music and thought,” Maraini claims, it still conveys its extraordinary effects and could even turn, like the original, into an instrument of salvation. It is Maria who provides a key example of the formidable power of the written word when she recalls a book of memoirs written by a Holocaust survivor that she once translated. Some prisoners in a concentration camp, gathering in the disgusting latrines after a dreary day of toil, would secretly recite poems they had memorized in their youth in a “soft chant” and a “rhythmic hum.” In those dreadful conditions, “the poems would miraculously give them the strength to go on, . . . the strength to survive in that place of torture and death,” not unlike what Primo Levi experienced in “If This Is a Man” (Survival in Auschwitz) when reciting Dante’s Ulysses canto. It was that moving testimony that helped Maria learn “the kind of power that words can have when they become music and thought, a poignant and moving strategy of survival.”
The conclusion of “Life, Brazen and Garish” confirms the healing, therapeutic power of words that not only nurtures our imaginations and dreams but can help us cope with trauma and soothe our suffering… The act of translation entails acceptance and recognition of the other’s discourse. It opposes, as such, any attitude of appropriation and possession of the voice of the other—what the androcentric discourse has been doing over the centuries, according to Maraini the feminist activist, manipulating, internalizing, and silencing women’s voices. This patriarchal strategy is explicitly denounced in the book by Gesuina and Lori.
Elvira G. Di Fabio has done an exquisite job respecting the linguistic complexity of the original text while keeping it readable and comprehensible. She managed to direct and orient the reader even in relation to Lori’s free, unrestrained speech. Thus, Lori’s diary entries preserve the qualities of her fragmented, slangy discourse, with her rapid sequence of short sentences and the frantic and inchoate stream of thoughts. And yet Di Fabio, mindful of the overlapping of the women’s vocabulary and the progressive mirroring of each other’s style in their texts, knowingly allows the reader to be part of their tight community and perceive in their writing not only a moment of self-discovery but a relational space in which they can redefine and negotiate their subjectivities.
Eilis Kierans is an assistant teaching professor at Penn State where her research focuses on
contemporary literature, film, queer studies, ecocriticism, and feminist food studies. She has
published articles that examine the work of Gabriella Kuruvilla, Clara Sereni, Dacia Maraini,
Grazia Deledda, Christian Petzold, and Italian American women writers. She is editor of the
creative reviews section of Italian Quarterly. Eilis is passionate about experiential learning and
has guided students on educational trips around Italy, Argentina, and Ecuador.
Alessandro Vettori is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University where he currently serves as Chair of the Department of Italian. His most recent monograph is Dante’s Prayerful Pilgrimage: Typologies of Prayer in Dante’s Comedy (Brill, 2019). At the moment his research involves the use of money and poverty in Dante and Franciscan thinkers of the 13th and 14th centuries through
the lens of Liberation Theology. He is the editor of the journal of Italian Studies Italian
Quarterly and he co-edits the translation series Other Voices of Italy with Rutgers
University Press.
Sandra Waters is the managing editor of Italian Quarterly and a co-editor of Other Voices of Italy with Rutgers University Press. Her recent publications include chapters and articles on Luther Blisset and Wu Ming, Paolo Sorrentino’s films in English, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s La briganta, and American horror film. She co-edited The Spaces and Places of Horror with Francesco Pascuzzi (Vernon Press 2020), and co-translated Porpora Marcasciano’s AntoloGaia with Francesco Pascuzzi which was released in fall 2023 for the OVOI series.