Category Italian
Does my translation have an accent? Exophonic Translation and the Experience of Language
Exophonic translators question not only the equation language and culture, but also the motives driving the translation of a certain work of literature in a certain language. The motives rest in the translator’s “language biography,” a complex and fascinating intersection of personal experiences, bodily encounters and relationships with languages and texts, as well as subjective perception of languages and cultures. In other words, with exophonic translators, the focus is not on the translated text, but on the translators themselves. This shift of focus from text to translator has led to the creation of a new sub field of Translation Studies, called Translator Studies, investigating the lived experiences of individual translators, or their Spracherleben.
Between Two Worlds: Viola Ardone’s “The Children’s Train,” Translated from Italian by Clarissa Botsford
Viola Ardone’s international bestseller “The Children’s Train,” translated in English by Clarissa Botsford, offers a touching glimpse into post-war Italy’s “happiness trains” (i treni della felicità). Part of a relief effort organized by the Italian Communist Party, these trains sent 70,000 impoverished children from southern Italy to live temporarily with families in the north. Through a blend of historical detail and imaginative storytelling, Ardone tells the tale of one child, Amerigo Speranza, and how his experience with the children’s train shapes his life.
Invisibility of the Foreign: The Double Life of Alessandro Baricco’s “Silk” in English Translation
Alessandro Barrico’s “Silk” is a story about the tension between Self and Other. Baricco’s main character Hervé Joncour travels repeatedly to Japan from his small, French town of LaVilleDieu in the 1860, to buy masses of silkworm eggs to replenish those at home struck by a silkworm-killing blight. Leaving his wife Hélène at home, he becomes secretly enamored with a young Japanese girl, whom he distinguishes for her eyes that “did not have an oriental slant” (19), a feature that immediately calls into question her otherness while nonetheless asserting her foreignness.
“Like Grasping Nothing”: Revisiting Alessandro Baricco’s “Silk”
Above all, “Silk” is a novel that dwells in silences and negative spaces, an examination of unfulfilled desire and all that remains unspoken. Joncour’s fixation on the young concubine that captured his imagination remains unrealized, buried beneath clandestine love notes and quick glances. Joncour himself remains evasive throughout the novel, his identity as slippery and difficult to grasp as a swath of silk (back home in France he becomes “the Japanese,” not only a reference to his travels, but also a hint at the other hidden inside the self). It is in these empty spaces that this story of desire and identity begins to unfurl, as lush and heady as a children’s fable.
Workshop Notes Part 2: Translation and Retranslation
Published in Italy in 1996, “Silk” (Seta) was an immediate bestseller. It was translated in English in 1997 by Guido Waldman – a respected translator and editor whose titles include Ludovico Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso” and Giovanni Bocaccio’s “The Decameron.” Retranslated by none other than Ann Goldstein in 2006, “Silk” accompanied the film adaptation, an international co-production that didn’t receive much acclaim. Despite the film’s lackluster fate, the retranslation in English of a contemporary literary work by a living author less than 10 years after its first translation, is a notable event.
The Qualities of Silk in Ann Goldstein’s and Guido Waldman’s Translations of Alessandro Baricco’s “Silk”
“Silk” reads differently in each of its two English translations. The style of writing and the quality of the prose is where the two translations diverge. Goldstein has prioritized the “sparseness” of Baricco’s prose in a very literal sense. Her translation is minimal in its embellishments and its interpretation, rendering the novel into English in its most accurate, albeit plain, form. Waldman, on the other hand, has evidently prioritized the text’s beauty and lyricism.
Between Italy and North America «In Rhyme and Without»: Giorgio Bassani’s “Collected Poems”
The publication of “The Collected Poems,” with excellent translations and critical apparatus by Roberta Antognini and Peter Robinson, represents, alongside Norton’s 2018 edition of “The Novel of Ferrara” translated by Jamie McKendrick, the culmination of Bassani’s work now available to the English-speaking public.
Translators on Books that Should Be Translated: Enrica Ferrara’s “Mia madre aveva una cinquecento gialla”
The novel is a vivid recapturing of Italian life in the 1980s, but more than that it engages, and beautifully captures, the universal mystery of each person’s origins – in a specific place and time, in a social caste, and, most of all, from a set of parents – and evokes the loneliness of that insoluble mystery.
A Pervasive Method: on John Taylor’s Approach in Translating Franca Mancinelli’s “All the Eyes that I Have Opened”
Taylor’s translation appears to be a systematic operation—in other words—oriented by his acknowledgment of a philosophically (as well as poetically) coherent nucleus in “All the Eyes that I Have Opened,” a collection that constitutes one of the most interesting releases of recent contemporary Italian poetry.
Ritual sites of communion and community: Marosia Castaldi’s “The Hunger of Women,” translated from Italian by Jamie Richards
The novel is narrated from the perspective of a fifty-year-old Neapolitan widow, Rosa, whose daughter’s coming independence and plan to move to France lead to Rosa’s decision to start a restaurant in small-town Lombardy. Rosa’s restaurant becomes a source of orgiastic frenzy for the Lombard villagers, who devour her traditional Neapolitan cooking in a kind of carnal ecstasy.
Reading Natalia Ginzburg in the Twenty-First Century
The increased visibility of Natalia Ginzburg’s translated works and renewed engagement with her literary production speak to the traumatic realism 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.
An Act of Love and a Restitution: Maria Grazia Calandrone’s “Your Little Matter,” translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri
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.”
Bringing “The Art of Joy” to English Readers
For me, translating this book, in which dialect plays such an integral role, was a continuation of my ongoing nurturing of my Sicilian roots. From the time I first visited Sicily, slept in the room where my maternal nonna Biagina did as a girl, and delighted in the fragrance of jasmine wafting from the terrazza outside her window, Sicily, its scents, flavors, rituals and ways have been formative. So it was not surprising that one of the first choices I made when I began translating the book, was to leave as much of the dialect in there as I could without rendering the text illegible to English readers.
AI’s Future in the Past: Dino Buzzati’s “The Singularity,” Translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel
Anne Milano Appel’s new translation of Dino Buzzati’s “The Singularity” is a timely translation: long considered one of the author’s minor works, Buzzati’s parable of artificial intelligence and the ethics of technology will resonate deeply with today’s readers.
Stransky & Starnone
Oonagh Stransky’s translation of Domenico Starnone’s monumental novel “The House on Via Gemito” (Europa Editions, 2023) is a tour de force. The vast, complex narrative comes to life in Stransky’s words, enabling in English Starnone’s profound investigation of a son’s relationship with his larger-than-life, exuberant, violent, irrepressible father. Longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize and shortlisted the 2024 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, Stransky’s translation deserves more attention.