Category Italian
TRANSLATORS ON BOOKS THAT SHOULD BE TRANSLATED: ADRIÁN BRAVI’S “ADELAIDA”
“Adelaida” is a marvelous book that left me breathless; I intentionally slowed down while reading its last pages, since I didn’t want it to end. A slim book of 142 pages, it mixes together many disparate genres: it is at once a diaspora story that portrays the lives of Argentinian political activists living in and out of exile during the late twentieth century, a historical account of the crimes perpetrated by Argentinian dictatorships, a cultural essay about the Buenos Aires literary scene in the fifties and sixties, a personal history of the friendship between the author and his protagonist, Adelaida, and, finally, a testimony to the role played by women in history and art.
“Qualcosa era successo”: Dino Buzzati and Sandro Veronesi on the Train to Doomsday
In two stories, written approximately three-quarters of a century apart – “Dino Buzzati’s “Qualcosa era successo” (“Something Had Happened,” 1949) and Sandro Veronesi’s “Qualcosa era successo” (2026) – an ordinary train ride becomes an allegory about fear of the unknown and powerlessness in the face of inexplicable events.
“The Craft of Living”: Restoring the Form of Cesare Pavese’s Journals for English-Speaking Readers
Translating “The Craft of Living” into English presents the singular task of transposing Pavese’s eloquent thoughts about life and literature into the language that inspired many of his points of view in the first place. By the time Pavese began publishing works in prose, in the early 1940s, he had already penned the Italian translations of works by Melville, Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Joyce, Defoe, Dickens, Lewis, and Stein and was in the process of translating Faulkner.
The View from Gaza: Some Thoughts on Translating Sami al-Ajrami’s “The Keys to My House”
“Translation is the most intimate act of reading.” The definition comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a preface to her translation of eighteenth-century Bengali poetry. I didn’t learn much in grad school, but I do remember at least one thing: it’s a very bad idea to argue with Gayatri Spivak. So I won’t. However, her insight, which has been seconded by scholars of translation everywhere, should really be understood as both a blessing and a curse. If translation is an intimate act, what then happens when a translator translates testimony from a witness to genocide?
Posing and Passing in Translation: from Amara Lakhous to Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri
In this essay I consider “posing” and “passing” as narrative, cultural, and linguistic mechanisms that help us understand how exophonic and migrant identities are negotiated in contemporary Italian literature. More specifically, I examine practices of translation in relation to practices of posing and passing as Italian.
Idara Crespi Introduces Espresso Publishing House and Francesco Mastriani’s “The Blind Woman of Sorrento”
Translator and publisher Idara Crespi introduces Espresso Publishing House, a new Canadian press specializing in translated literature. Crespi also introduces the inaugural publication of Espresso Publishing, Francesco Mastriani’s Gothic thriller “The Blind Woman of Sorrento” which she translated herself.
To Begin Again: Antonio Moresco’s “The Beginnings,” Translated from Italian by Max Lawton
Born in 1948 in Mantova, Antonio Moresco has been a Catholic seminarian, a militant in Italy’s extra-parliamentary left during the Years of Lead and, finally, a writer. Now considered by many Italian readers (but, it must be said, only by a handful of Italian critics, which significantly hindered his recognition at home and abroad) to be one of the most important living Italian writers, he had a troubled publishing history: “The Beginnings” took more than ten years to find a publisher, before coming out for the first time in 1998.
Translation as Teamwork: Anne Milano Appel Interviews Max Lawton and Francesco Pacifico about Antonio Moresco’s “The Beginnings”
Intrigued by the collaboration between Max Lawton and Francesco Pacifico, most recently on the translation of Antonio Moresco’s “Gli Esordi” (The Beginnings, Deep Vellum, 2026), a surreal, experimental novel which is the first book in the author’s “Games of Eternity” trilogy, I decided to ask them about it.
Sewing Toward the Sea: Marosia Castaldi’s “The Hunger of Women” as Écriture Féminine
Rosa takes up the challenge of reinventing (recentering) her writing around women—an act of creation which Cixous might refer to as écriture féminine. And while culinary themes dominate her narrative, with lists of foods and recipes often spanning several pages at a time, Rosa accomplishes this recentering using two other themes: the metaphor of the sea, and a reimagined matrilineal genealogy.
LISTENING IN TRANSLATION: THE PODCAST “AN ANCIENT LANGUAGE FOR A MODERN SOUL. POEMI CONVIVIALI BY GIOVANNI PASCOLI”
Throughout “Poemi Conviviali,” music surfaces again and again, sometimes eerie and disquieting, often located in the limbo between life and death, or dream and reality; sometimes as the Dionysian, ecstatic sound of drums and double flutes, but most often as melodies performed on a stringed instrument, the lyre, which is the ancestor of the modern harp.
Off in the Distance: Lalla Romano’s “In Farthest Seas,” Translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore
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.
No Bridges at the Estuary: Giorgia Meriggi in Dialogue with Poet Franca Mancinelli and Translator John Taylor
This dialogue originated from my reading in August 2024 of Franca Mancinelli’s The Butterfly Cemetery, translated by John Taylor. Every day I put Franca’s collection of essays and narratives in my backpack and set off on long hikes in the high mountains.
Myth as Mirror: Cesare Pavese’s “The Leucothea Dialogues,” Translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor
Rather than retelling myths, in “The Leucothea Dialogues” Cesare Pavese uses them as a framework for meditations on fate, death, suffering, and the fraught relationship between gods and humans.
Writing on the High Wire: Daniele Del Giudice’s “A Fictional Inquiry,” translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel
How do you write about the compelling need to write, to translate reality into narrative, while also writing about someone who decided not to write? The title of Anne Milano Appel’s English translation, published by New Vessel Press, suitably spells it out: this is “A Fictional Inquiry,” an investigation into the nature of fiction itself and its entanglements with reality.
There Can Never Be Too Many Cooks: On Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” in English and in Italian Translation
For six years, I have had a tradition: right around the beginning of December, when the Florida heat finally cools off, I slip my copy of Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” off the shelf and allow it to rekindle a warmth within my being. Translated in English by Megan Backus, the light, intricate, and mouth-watering prose of the novella has delighted me endlessly.