With the New York Times recently placing Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend at #1 on its list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century, we turn to a twentieth-century Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), who influenced Ferrante and who continues to influence other writers today.
This is an excerpt (modified for online publication) from “Global Ginzburg: Reading Natalia Ginzburg in the Twenty-First Century,” our co-authored introduction to the volume that we co-edited, Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies (Palgrave, 2024). The project was born out of the special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” that Reading in Translation published in 2021 to mark the 30th anniversary of Natalia Ginzburg’s death.
Now, 33 years after her death, her works are still very much alive and speaking to us in the voices of their new translators and from the pages of new editions. We look forward to more new translations and to new critical engagements with her writing.
Stiliana Milkova Rousseva and Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski
The Italian author Natalia Ginzburg’s presence in the Anglophone world is well established in the 21st century. While the first English translation of Ginzburg’s most famous work, Lessico famigliare, followed the French and German ones, there are now three English translations, a rarity for any modern Italian work: Family Sayings (by D.M. Low, 1967), The Things We Used to Say (by Judith Woolf, 1997), and Family Lexicon (by Jenny McPhee, 2017). Her collected stories, novellas, novels, plays, and numerous essays are also available for English readers, some of them in more than one translation. Rachel Cusk, Sally Rooney, and Colm Tóibín have provided introductions for recent editions of her works, which include Minna Zallman Proctor’s translation of Happiness, As Such (2019), Gini Alhadeff’s translation of The Road to the City (2023), the reprinted editions of The Dry Heart (2019), Valentino and Sagittarius (2020), Family and Borghesia (2021), and Voices in the Evening (2021). In 2021, the online journal Reading in Translation marked the thirtieth anniversary of Ginzburg’s death by publishing a special issue, “Reading Natalia Ginzburg,” featuring 15 critical essays, interviews, and first-English translations all commissioned for the occasion.
Ginzburg (1916-1991) is known for recounting History – Fascism and the racial laws, the second world war, exile, and Italy’s post-war struggles – through the perspectives of marginalized characters and individual family histories. Her life and work spanned almost the entire twentieth century and she was a significant figure in the Italian literary world. In addition to working at the foundational publishing house Einaudi, she had friendships and exchanges with many of the most important authors of the twentieth century, including Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino, Alba de Cespedes, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Cesare Pavese. Critics have used Calvino and Pasolini to map Italy’s intellectual landscape, which shifts once Ginzburg is also brought into these discussions. The authors of this volume repeatedly highlight Ginzburg’s anti-ideological stances, which are accompanied by her investigations of major issues of her time, such as fascism, terrorism, communism, socialism, changing media, abortion, divorce, adoption, women’s rights, and gender roles. The recent translations of many more Italian women authors, such as Marta Barone, Marina Jarre, Lalla Romano, Goliarda Sapienza, and Nadia Terranova provide Anglophone readers with a chance to situate Ginzburg’s crucial contributions to gender discourses in Italian contexts.
While some of the notable attention Ginzburg has garnered in recent years is due to the popularity of contemporary Italian writer Elena Ferrante, with whom she has been linked (Caserta 2019 and Milkova 2021a), Ginzburg’s writing also addresses questions relevant today, in our post-pandemic world, from the traumatic experiences of war and violence to questions about gender and identity. Her “poetics of the real” (Wehling-Giorgi 2021) construct a world of objects and domestic spaces, of moral dilemmas and human behaviors, of quotidian routines and ordinary lives which in its totality possesses a universal, timeless resonance. The increased visibility of Ginzburg’s translated works and renewed engagement with her literary production speak to the “traumatic realism” (Foster 1996) of our own historical moment as we look for modes of resistance and survival. Ginzburg’s works, generated in part from the traumatic events that marked her own life, narrate in turn the minor and major hardships of human existence.
Much of Ginzburg’s early life was marked by the advent of fascism in 1922 and her Turinese family’s anti-fascist investments. In 1938, the year the racial laws were introduced, Natalia Levi married Leone Ginzburg, an anti-fascist Jewish intellectual from Odessa and one of the founders of the Einaudi publishing house. She followed him in internal exile in the Abruzzi region where she wrote her first longer work, The Road to the City (La strada che va in città, 1942),and began translating Proust. Leone Ginzburg was captured, tortured, and died in prison in 1944, leaving Natalia Ginzburg with three small children. In 1950, Ginzburg married Gabriele Baldini (1919-1969) and they had two children, a son who died at one and a disabled daughter (born 1954), whom Ginzburg cared for until her own death in 1991.[1]
Despite the significant public appreciation for Ginzburg’s works in translation, her presence in Anglophone literary criticism in the 21st century is less remarkable. Domenico Scarpa has pointed out that Ginzburg is not as admired by critics as she is by general readers because her texts do not lend themselves easily to theoretical approaches (Ginzburg 2016, 264). There are already more Anglophone books dedicated to analyzing Ferrante than there are to Ginzburg. The scholarship on Ginzburg in English amounts to a few monographs (Bullock 1991, Jeannet and Sanguinetti Katz 2000, Picarazzi 2002, Castronuovo 2010) and a couple of dozen articles or reviews of Ginzburg’s oeuvre along with single chapters and sections in scholarly books (Wood 1995, Amoia 1996, Simborowski 2003, Parussa 2008, Coburn 2013, Fanning 2017). Biographical and historical-political readings that revolve around Ginzburg’s major texts are the norm.
Eric Gudas has called attention to the constant “reintroduction” of Ginzburg to English-speaking audiences: “We are stuck in a loop of ‘reintroducing Natalia Ginzburg’” (2021). This volume does not serve as a reintroduction, but brings together new, interdisciplinary approaches to Ginzburg and makes available in English important Italian research. Bridging Anglophone and Italian scholarship from around the world, Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies places Ginzburg’s works in major critical discourses in order to mobilize further lines of inquiry: translation practices, world literature, and transnational studies (Part One: “World Literature and World Making”); gender-fluid identity, queer studies, speech act theory, intersectional feminism, and media studies (Part Two: “Female Bodies, Voices, and Gazes”); trauma studies, topography, novel studies, essay studies, and Jewish identity (Part Three: “Identity, Topography, and Forms”). This variety exemplifies how Ginzburg’s texts can generate and sustain a range of theoretical lenses and approaches.
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The frequent retranslation of Family Lexicon suggests the beauty and power of Ginzburg’s writing. Her style is often matter-of-fact and straight-forward, building up meaning through strategic repetition that can be hard to render in English without risking “ennoblement” (Berman 2012). The title of her play Ti ho sposato per allegria, which can be translated as I Married you for Fun, as Luciano Salce’s film adaptation has been translated; I Married you for Happiness, asJane House has translated it (Ginzburg 2015);or I Married You to Cheer Myself Up, as Wendell Ricketts has translated it(Ginzburg 2008), indicates the nuanced simplicity of Ginzburg’s language that prompts revisiting the translation choices. The title of her novella Le voci della sera, Voices in the Evening, evokes the polyphonic presence of voices in and of the evening. The phrase “burying one’s thoughts” she uses in Voices in the Evening and elsewhere to imply that a character has repressed his or her true feelings is as complex as straight-forward. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s A Place to Live, a translation of several of Ginzburg’s important essays, also suggests the disarmingly simple appeal of Ginzburg’s language, in all her genres. Several of this volume’s chapters analyze the importance of Ginzburg’s language and what is not necessarily clear from her English editions (see for instance Ferrara on “un grand’uomo,” Milkova Rousseva on “intreccio,” Todesco on “malagrazie”).
This volume is accessible to readers without any Italian and, at the same time, calls attention to the linguistic nuance of Ginzburg’s Italian. Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies encompasses multiple approaches and readings while, like Ginzburg’s own writing, keeping them within reach, rooted in a recognizable and relatable reality – literature, translation, and the world; the body, the voice, and the gaze; urban spaces, novelistic forms, and expressions of identity.
[1] Sandra Petrignani’s biography of Natalia Ginzburg, La corsara (2018), is a well-researched, engaging, and informative text that narrates and maps Ginzburg’s life through Petrignani’s own perspective as a woman writer while also providing remarkable insight into Ginzburg’s works as well.
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