The memoir Dove non mi hai portata by multi-awarded poet and journalist Maria Grazia Calandrone was published in Italy in 2022 to huge public and critical acclaim. A finalist for the 2023 Strega Prize, now translated into English by Antonella Lettieri as Your Little Matter for Foundry Editions, this book is a restitution. This is the first information we learn as we dwell over the book’s threshold and read its epigraph: “All I have seen of you, to you I return, loved.”
It is an act of love from a daughter, the writer, to her mother, Lucia Galante, who passed away when her baby was only eight months old. The child Maria Grazia had no memory of Lucia and so, as an adult, she embarks on a journey of discovery to collate objects, photographs, and archive materials in order to gather information about her. It is a complex operation because Lucia was no ordinary woman: her death, on 24 June 1965, was the object of public interest and gave rise to a major police inquiry.
On that day, Lucia Galante walked to her death by suicide when she drowned herself into the Tiber river after abandoning her daughter Maria Grazia on a blanket laid out over a lawn near the entrance of Villa Borghese in Rome. Accompanying her was Giuseppe Di Pietro, thirty years older than Lucia, who was the baby’s biological father and also took his own life. Their relationship was adulterous and punishable in a court of law given that, according to articles 559 and 560 of the Italian criminal code, they were “wanted by the police” and, if charged, they could have been condemned to two years in prison.
It is a tragic institutional failure that unfolds in June 1965 causing the death of two adults and irreversibly changing the course of Maria Grazia’s life, a tragedy that could have been avoided if the law on divorce, which came into force in 1970, had been already formalized. Due to the public scandal which ensued after the two bodies were recovered, the couple’s belongings were treated as evidence, making it impossible for Maria Grazia – adopted by a leader of the Italian Communist Party, Giacomo Calandrone, and his wife Consolazione – to come in their possession. In fact, the author had no real desire to learn further information about her biological mother until 2021 when she published her book Splendi come vita (Ponte alle Grazie), a lyrical and autobiographical account of Maria Grazia’s relationship with her adoptive mother. Invited to present that memoir on national television, Calandrone’s origin story got back into the public eye, and the writer received several messages by individuals who had been acquainted with Lucia and wished to share information with the daughter.
Thus the journey began: over half a century after Lucia’s death, Maria Grazia decided to travel around the country to explore the places in which her mother had grown up, gone to school, fallen in love with her first sweetheart Tonino, was forced to marry “the village buffoon,” Luigi “Cento Lire,” who had “no interest in women” (62), got maltreated and beaten up by her in-laws, met Giuseppe, ran away to Milan with him when she was six months pregnant, delivered her baby, struggled through poverty and deprivation, and lastly devised the plan to commit suicide with Giuseppe in Rome. Along this trip, in which the lucid prose of the non-fictional memoir often strays from the expected tracks of narrative syntax and drifts into verse, Maria Grazia encounters human and nonhuman sources which will allow her to illuminate her mother’s life and “revive” her body, “as hot as the earth in the summer and as firm” (19).
There is nearly an act of faith involved in Calandrone’s “transubstantiation” of Lucia’s body, turned into a text which is first and foremost a lyrical one: a miracle that can only happen thanks to a strong belief in the power of objects – matter, entities, living beings – to communicate their own stories as well as the stories of humans who interact with them. What Calandrone does, in fact, is a sort of eco-translation, a key concept coined by Michael Cronin to illustrate a practice of translation in narratives of “human-nonhuman connectedness.”
The objects Lucia wore or touched, later handed over to Maria Grazia by the police – “a black purse made of faux crocodile skin,” a “tube of Colgate toothpaste,” “the carefully folded information leaflet for Forhans mouthwash,” “two dainty white gloves from her wedding day,” “a bronze thimble with a blue ink stain and a round tub of Nivea cream,” to name but a few – are described as the “things left alone” (220-221). Despite their status as abandoned things, they retain a trace of their connection with Lucia, which can be interpreted, or eco-translated, by Maria Grazia in an attempt to restore meaning to her mother’s life, to her desperate gesture. And so, while she scrutinizes Lucia’s belongings, the writer finds “a gift that comes from time” she had nearly missed: “the toothpaste tube retains, on its two opposite faces, the metaphysical imprint of Lucia’s childlike fingers, index and thumb. My Mother’s hands” (222).
It is not a coincidence that translator Antonella Lettieri, in her perceptive translator’s note, mentions the “process of metempsychosis” which was required of her in order to step into the mind of the author who, in turn, blurred boundaries with the identities of her dead parents in order to try and bring them back to life. It is an interesting choice of words given that “metempsychosis” entails a transmigration of the souls across the human and the nonhuman world, which is quite different from reincarnation, and well conveys the sort of animism evoked by Calandrone in her description of objects and landscapes.
In particular, a central role is played in the text by the river Tiber which swallowed Lucia’s life and is the place “where you did not take me,” as the title of the Italian edition recites: Dove non mi hai portata. Mysterious and magnificent, the title alludes to the selfless gesture of love by a mother who endured separation from her eight-month-old daughter in an effort to warrant her a better chance in life. In English, the title Your Little Matter, equally powerful, moves the focus from the river to the matter that was rescued from it, that is Lucia’s body addressed as “your little matter” at the very end of the novel. But, truly, this choice – which I suspect to be far from fortuitous – is a nod to the animism that pervades the memoir and to the principle of interconnectedness among all living beings which enables the author to resuscitate her mother’s body from the river after such a long period of time. As one of the central chapters reminds the readers: “In the beginning, there is living matter […] Scattered through the immense separation that contains everything, life replicates itself by producing a number – to this day uncounted, since we know little of the species that live in the twinkling darkness of the ocean – of ingenious living containers of their own living matter” (152).
In the above passage we note a real sense of solidarity between diverse forms of life, human and more-than-human, but also awareness that “for life to be, separation is necessary” (152): a theme that suggests the inevitability of Lucia’s suicide and her subsequent return to the indistinct embrace of all living matter. As Lettieri observes, this book is a “miracle” in that it succeeds in combining the two divergent and seemingly incompatible registers of science and poetry. To these we should at least add the register of crime news that keeps the readers engrossed in the reconstruction of Lucia and Giuseppe’s story until the very end, balancing out the frequent cultural references to Italian literature and film which may otherwise generate a slight sense of estrangement in non-Italian audiences (among others, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work is often mentioned).
Masterfully navigating the sea of choices often instigated by the ambiguity of Calandrone’s words that require different translation approaches depending on the register and context, Lettieri set off on a veritable translating tour-de-force which demanded creativity, attention to scientific details, intercultural awareness, and prehensility of thought. She has demonstrated to possess all those qualities in copious amounts, and we are very grateful to her for the gift of Your Little Matter’s poignant English version.
Calandrone, Maria Grazia. Your Little Matter. Translated by Antonella Lettieri. Foundry Editions, 2024.
Enrica Maria Ferrara is a tenured Teaching Fellow in Italian at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), as well as a writer and a translator. Her titles include, among others: Calvino e il teatro (Peter Lang, 2011); Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Calvino, Pasolini (Firenze University Press, 2014); Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages (Franco Cesati, 2017; co-edited with Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin); Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity(Palgrave Macmillan 2020); Reading Domenico Starnone (Special Issue of “Reading in Translation,” 2021; co-edited with Stiliana Milkova). Ferrara’s debut novel in Italian, Mia madre aveva una Cinquecento gialla, was published in 2024. Ferrara is now co-editing with Russell Kilbourn a Special Issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies on Critical Posthumanism in Italian Film, and with Claudia Dellacasa a collection of essays on Italo Calvino and World Literature (Bloomsbury Academics).