Brian Robert Moore’s stellar and highly engaging translation of Lalla Romano’s In Farthest Seas is the third in a recent rediscovery of Romano’s writing to be published in English. Originally published in 1987 by Mondadori as Nei mari estremi, Moore’s translation fills a hole in English translation from an essential contemporary Italian writer. Moore’s thoughtful and nuanced approach to Romano’s Italian is a seamless and poetic justification for why we should be bringing increased attention to works in translation, especially with the threat of an AI takeover of the art. Moore gives us a readable text without sacrificing the intensity of emotion from which the original Italian draws, as subtle as it is. Quite simply, his translation of Nei mari estremi is a masterclass in the art of translation.
In Farthest Seas is divided into two sections. The first, and much shorter part, is titled “Four Years” and explores the initial meeting between Romano and her future husband Innocenzo Monti. The second part, entitled “Four Months,” examines the last four months of Monti’s life. Together, both parts form a highly personal observation on what it means to fall in love and what it means to witness the failing health and eventual death of the beloved as he succumbs to a terminal illness.
Poignant, and at times breathtakingly honest, In Farthest Seas joins a select group of narratives that help us cope with the death of a loved one through the eyes of the writer, who cannot help but transform that pain into a story so that the writer, as well as the reader, may begin to comprehend it. Like religion, narrative also helps us to make sense of things by turning the experience into story, narrative contains time, thus rendering it interpretable. This is a skill unique to humans. We are story-telling creatures, and to make sense of life we place it into narrative form, encapsulating time and giving life meaning.
Romano’s story is one of beginnings and endings. The beginning sketches out what coming to love consists of for the narrator. Interestingly, it’s not the voice or the face, or even the clothing the narrator first notices, but, through a friend, the hands: “He was standing there. Legs slightly apart (with hiking boots, we were in the mountains); he was telling a story, one hand held against his chest, the other raised. His hands were big and long, his fingers together, extended” (9). What strikes me here is that the female narrator notices the hands. No other body part or aspect of the male speaker catches her attention at first.
Romano’s focus on the hands is only a door slightly open, however. Later, while walking together, they begin to speak of Modigliani: “So, walking after dinner on that road, he spoke of Modigliani. Everyone talked about him in those days, and everyone (the foolish ones, which is to say almost everyone) acted outraged: the long necks, the flat colours, et cetera. I loved Modigliani deeply then” (15). The spell had been cast. No wonder the hands of the man made such an impact. Romano’s love of Modigliani would mean that her attention to him began with the body, but in a non-sexual way: “He spoke of Modigliani with admiration, in a grave, serious tone” (15). The attraction is intellectual, a meeting of the minds bringing together two worlds.
Perhaps most interesting in this part is the fact that Romano and Monti both do not feel the need to follow conventional matrimonial traditions. In fact, Romano declares that “I’ve always detested, no less than now, the words: wife, husband, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, and the like” (32). The resistance to traditional norms, including the concepts listed just above, indicate a woman’s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of other woman and fulfill certain expectations. The need to set oneself apart, especially as a woman, and especially at this point in European history, takes courage and determination. Romano’s legacy may be that her ability to side-step conventional norms, but not completely (she does marry him, but in a very private ceremony) informs all her work.
The second and longer half of the book deals with Monti’s death, but always through Romano’s eyes. Throughout this section Monti is portrayed as a stoic individual who accepts his fate but also feels compassion for the ones who must witness the act of dying, which is neither quick nor painless and can be demeaning. As Romano writes, “I’d seen him many times, from behind, sitting on the edge of the bed, bent over to adjust part of his nightclothes, and he seemed to me a rummaging beggar, hunched over his rags, seated on the curb of the pavement” (115). And yet, it might be that through death (just as it can be through love) we are at our most human.
A few years ago, I had a dream that I died. The death wasn’t painful, but incredibly sad. I recall that I was in a room on my knees and my vision started to become strange. I soon felt myself withdrawing, as if everything around me was simultaneously receding and getting narrower. I can also recall hearing a clock tick down, then, nothing. Blackness. It was like something in me ran down to zero, leaving only nothingness. Reading this work, I came across this line which brought the dream back to me: “It was not in illnesses that I feared losing him; but in absences, in distance. To die was to move off into the distance” (58).
What strikes me most about this book is its understated yet profound portrayal of love and death. It’s almost as if Romano is far removed from the events in which she is narrating. This is not a criticism, but, perhaps, a testament to the ability of a woman to put down as precisely and dispassionately as possible what it was like to fall in love and then lose that love many years later. But “dispassionately” is not quite right either. There is passion in this book, and a sense of intimacy that will engage the reader from the very beginning. Reading In Farthest Seas is like listening to a melancholy melody played during a light rain. It’s noticeable, but soft and alluring. Readers who enjoy Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, or David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death will gravitate toward this book. Taken together, they all (and many more unmentioned) further contextualize what it means to be human, and that, in the end, may mean bearing our vulnerability and the distances it brings which simultaneously sets us apart from humanity and a links us together.
Romano, Lalla. In Farthest Seas. Translated by Brian Robert Moore. Pushkin Press, 2025.
Andrew Martino is Dean of the Glenda Chatham & Robert G. Clarke Honors College at Salisbury University where he is also professor of English. He has published on Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Luigi Pirandello, among others. He is a regular reviewer for World Literature Today, and is currently finishing a manuscript on Paul Bowles.